The Lies in the Truth
by AmandaFriend
Summary: Part of the Bonesology Summer Challenge: take the 100 themes and turn them into story. Here is my solution for the cliffhanger at the end of season 9: Booth has been arrested, Brennan has been detained and the Mighty Hut is no longer so mighty. Only the writers and producers know how this will turn out. This is only my take on the story. Spoilers abound as does speculation.
1. Introduction

**The Lies in the Truth**

_Author's note: As much as I hated the idea of Booth being accused of murder and facing an uncertain future, I really have a great deal of respect and admiration for the show to go there and create such a web of deceit for our heroes to unravel creating a complex story with so many rich possibilities. _

_I'm going to try my hand at this. While I have a general idea of where this is going, I welcome any ideas you might have. Bonesology has a list of 100 themes as a way to get through the summer and I thought I'd follow that list in order while writing this. I did it before with "Songs in the Key of Life" and managed to survive although it did take me a year to complete. I don't plan on taking a year for this. If any of you visit Bonesology, let them know someone's taken on their challenge, albeit, in my own way._

_Disclaimer: I don't own the characters of Bones, but I'm trying to do justice to them and by them._

**Introduction**

By the third day she finally noticed the bruise. It lay along the right anterior superior iliac crest, colors raging along her skin, the deep purple bullseye surrounded by ragged yellows and greens. She finally noticed the discoloration against her fair skin as she showered in her father's bathroom, the abused flesh tender as she ran the washcloth against it. Usually she would be more observant, but these past few days had been anything but normal.

She studied the colors as they splayed outward from the mottled purple as it went from biliverdin to bilirubin. She'd earned the bruise in the fight with the Delta Force operative, the split second when her weapon would not fire and he kicked her toward the kitchen where she skittered on the floor scattered with debris.

For three days she hadn't noticed the bruise, had barely paid attention to anything beyond trying to make sense of what had happened. With little more than a quick shower and a bite or two of food, usually at the insistence of Angela or her father, she'd twice faced questioning from Booth's FBI peers, been subject to review of her work at the Jeffersonian and had met with the lawyer Caroline had recommended for Booth. She'd slept, if one could call it sleep, Christine curled against her as the slow motion descent into a nightmare replayed itself again and again.

She leaned into the wall, allowing her forehead to rest against the tiles as she closed her eyes. Today she would meet with the lawyer again, try to see Booth again, see if she could enter her own home so recently turned into a battle zone, the crime scene tape sealing it off with a warning notice on the door threatening fines and imprisonment if she crossed her own threshold.

For years she'd sat at the interrogation table, asked the questions, watched the slow disintegration of lies turn into a semblance of the truth, watched as the combined weight of actions and realization turned arrogance to defeat. She'd seen evil before, but this new act had been an _**introduction**_ to a puzzle she couldn't quite solve. Somehow Booth was the suspect now, the lies weighing on her, crushing her so that she slipped to the bottom of the tub, the spray of water from above mingling with heated tears.


	2. Complicated

**Complicated**

_**Author's note: **__I don't pretend to know what the show will do to resolve the present conundrum, but my solution is going to come in uncharacteristically short chapters._ _My thought is that the characters will have to work independently of one another so as not to give any one person too much information that might derail the entire "rescue operation." A bit like a resistance cell. That idea permeates the story by following each person affected by the events at the end of season 9._

_There are problems with doing the story this way. The primary problem will be that the story may be a bit disjointed. And I might also hit you with more than one chapter a day in order to try to get to the magic 100 before I grow grayer or season 10 premieres. _

oOo

"I boxed up Foster's remains to the funeral home and I have a copy of the final report along with the transfer documents."

Colin Fisher liked the height advantage he had on Dr. Saroyan, liked the symbolism of looking down on her today, liked how he had been trusted by Dr. Brennan to finalize everything.

It hadn't been the first time he had been left to finish up, but somehow this time it had felt more important to get things right. Dr. Saroyan had been brusque that morning, her usual soft corners sharp and dangerous and he hadn't liked where any of this was headed. Dr. Brennan had been ordered to stay away and he had been put in the unenviable position to decide how to proceed beyond the string of orders from Dr. Saroyan.

That same Dr. Saroyan gave him a weary, "Thank you," an administratively neutral look but the slight swivel of her head from left to right told him he shouldn't feel so superior to her today.

She didn't like this one damned bit either.

He'd said his good-bye, took a side-trip into Dr. Brennan's office to put a few more pages into the binder, then headed toward limbo.

Granted, Dr. Saroyan was one of the establishment, one of the muckety-muck higher-ups who ran things. One of those people that could very well be one of the "they" that Hodgins had been railing on about the other day. But by most standards, she was a decent person who understood just how damning the whole situation was. But as a cog in the machine, she had chosen to keep the machinery in motion even if the movement was counter to the truth.

He could have done everything down to the letter of the instructions. Any other intern would have done just that, put the report of what the bastards had done to poor Mr. Foster into its own folder, updated the binder with evidence and test results, turned a blind eye to the reality of the situation. Bastard fate was playing fast and loose with Mr. Foster and Dr. Brennan and Agent Booth. Maybe that wasn't the order in which harm should be placed, given how Mr. Foster had already endured torture and excruciating death only to have his remains exploded like some kind of 100-proof bomb that also consumed his tin-can trailer home. But Agent Booth had been accused of killing three FBI agents and faced an uncertain future despite taking on three Delta Force mercenaries and cutting them down and Dr. Brennan was under suspicion with the FBI and her future work status with them was "under review."

By all rights, Mr. Foster should be given a fine funeral and his family should be allowed to mourn his passing, he had reasoned. But the funeral wonks that had come to pick him up were cheerless automatons that had no idea—nor did they care, really—what horror Mr. Foster's death had been. Fisher came to the end of the stairs and made the turn toward the freight elevator, pulling out his key as he strode toward it. He found its gray-green doors oddly comforting in their solemnity. The swoosh of the doors revealed the cart with the plastic container reserved for specimen bones upstairs and the unnamed remains downstairs.

Limbo. Somehow the name was appropriate. Mr. Foster would serve a better purpose here in Limbo, he thought, rather than be cremated and scattered in someone's flower garden. At least here he could be retrieved and bear silent witness to the horrors of his murder. "Someone will be back to find you," he said as he slid the container into the slot for Number 447. "While Agent Booth has eliminated the bastards that did this to you, there's probably someone higher up calling the shots."

"Things are _**complicated **_right now. You'll just have to wait a while longer for justice."


	3. Making History

**Making History**

The old hard drive had been harvested from the last upgrade on her computer and the monitor was borrowed from the office at the other end of the lab. The external hard drive connected to the CPU held the secrets of the universe, but not really.

Just the dirty little secrets of Crius.

No one would hack this computer. No one would try to read its mind, cull its secrets, disrupt its work because it was off the grid.

Hodgins had been the first to suggest it, but Booth's arrest had sold her on it. And the pain on Brennan's face had cemented her resolve even though she was scared to death of what they had and what more they might find.

This computer was slower than the newest incarnation of her system, but she had already made a few modifications and put it to work running through algorithms looking for the key that would decrypt the files and unlock everything. And the beauty of the thing was that she could hide it in plain sight.

That had been Hodgins, too. The monitor splashed photos of spiders that were part of some study he was working on and behind the images lurked a computer churning through calculations designed to unlock the code. Hodgins had liked the idea of using spiders to hide the web of lies. It was downright literary.

And frightening in how they were _**making history**_ of a different sort at the Jeffersonian.

That's why they were hiding this, keeping it under wraps, off the network, away from the server. Cam knew she had to be working on this, but she didn't know where, didn't know how. The little computer had churned through a few hundred possibilities and it would continue to work through hundreds more, maybe thousands, until they knew what Crius had been hiding.

Then God help them. God help them all.

How many times a day did she just stroll into the Ookey Room to see her husband? How many times were for a case? How many times were just because she wanted to see him?

How could anyone question them?

As far as their unfriendly hackers were concerned, they had lost all their data. Brennan had issued her report that Foster had died by accident and the case was closed.

They were skirting the truth, skirting the lies, just trying to keep the investigation alive by making it appear to be dead.

And somehow over the years, she had become good at working with the dead and, in a sense, bringing them back to life.

She just hoped the little computer had enough life in it left to help Booth avoid his own death.

oOo

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	4. Rivalry

**Rivalry**

He'd been captured before, beaten, tortured, interrogated by men taught to inflict the most pain for optimal effect.

And he hadn't talked then.

The accents had been different. The conditions worse. The circumstances. . . hell, he'd gone into each mission knowing he could be captured, tortured, killed. Left to die slowly. Painfully.

But here, they were pumping in fluids and medicines, his right arm strapped down with tubes and his right index finger clamped to a monitor.

And his wrist chained to the bed.

They would move him this afternoon to another ward, a locked hallway, a metal door, a buzzer to admit all visitors.

There wouldn't be visitors.

A doctor to oversee his recovery. Nurses to check vitals, feed him, wash him, change his gown. An orderly with an armed guard to take him to the bathroom.

A lawyer.

He closed his eyes and tried to imagine a different life, but the medications made him groggy and he just wanted to slip away into oblivion.

He couldn't even close his eyes and see her face.

Closing his eyes only brought back the battle in the house, the smell of gunpowder and cordite, blood pounding in his ears and running down his leg, the shredded walls, the broken glass.

But no _her_.

She had saved him. She had pulled a trigger and beaten back an invader and had put herself between life and death for him.

But he couldn't quite close his eyes and see her.

And he needed to see her. To touch her. To remind himself she was real and all this—the pulse of the monitor, the sting of the needle in his arm whenever he moved, the ache of a body given over to serve others in sometimes deadly pursuits—all this was some horrible, unbelievable nightmare.

To wake up—to have any hope of waking from this nightmare—_he had to see her_.

He stretched his legs again, tried to stretch his arms, but the cuff chaffed, reminding him he wasn't free to move.

He'd told his story, made it clear that he had acted alone in killing the three men.

"One was shot in the back, Agent Booth."

The words had branded him a coward, sneaking up behind the man and shooting him, but he had claimed he was saving his wife, keeping her from being killed from another man hunting her in their own home.

Whatever _**rivalry**_ truth had with lies had played out in his statement. He hadn't left anything out except the names of the others. _He_ had intercepted a phone call from the senator, _he_ had prepared his home for an assault. _He_ had killed three men who were trying to kill him.

He had prepared for war and won the battle, but lost the war and _he_ had to take responsibility.

Again he tried to stretch, felt the skin around his wounds ache in warning, felt his muscles scream in protest. And he didn't care.

He'd take the bullets again, tell more lies, face the devil himself if he could just see her again.


	5. Unbreakable

**Unbreakable**

She had a directness that he appreciated, so he gave her some in return.

"It doesn't look good for your husband."

He'd already laid out the skeleton of the government's case against her husband, already explained that whatever goodwill she or her husband had had with the government was erased in that firefight at her home.

"They're seeking the death penalty."

Her eyes, a pale blue with hints of gold near the irises, gave away little. "If Booth had killed three FBI agents, I would have expected nothing less."

She'd gone into objective mode moments into the meeting, her questions clear and precise, her observations on the government's case, deep and probing. Her understanding of the forensic evidence would be helpful as would her years of experience investigating murders. Dr. Temperance Brennan was a known element in the courtroom—knowledgeable, exacting__on the stand.

But Temperance Brennan was something more in this trial. A wife. A partner. A mother. And something more.

A wild card.

He'd witnessed it once before. She'd saved her father by casting doubt with the jury, crafting another story that had as much plausibility as her father killing Deputy Director Kirby. It had been a masterful stroke.

He leaned in. "The government is going to try to discredit Agent Booth and you," he said. "They are going to bring up everything and anything they can to prove the case against him and when they throw the mud, they aren't going to care that you get spattered in the process."

"Not literally."

He shook his head. "No. Not literally."

She hadn't wanted comfort or reassurances, just the facts of the case against her husband. She had told him essentially the same story as Agent Booth and Temperance Brennan's reputation was absolutely unimpeachable when it came to the truth.

"We've got another hearing this afternoon," he said. "Buckle up, you're in for a wild ride."

The look she afforded him suggested she was processing this latest metaphor. He decided to be direct.

"In Agent Booth's statement, he's taken credit for all three of the deaths. He's said that he was monitoring the congressman's phone line, but without a warrant, the evidence won't be admitted in court."

Others, when faced with the slew of evidence against their loved ones, might fall apart or run, but Dr. Temperance Brennan had an _**unbreakable**_ quality that he admired. She would need every ounce of strength for what was about to come.

"The FBI forensic teams want to bring down your husband because he killed three of their own and the justice system isn't forgiving of people who kill law enforcement officers."

"Booth didn't kill FBI agents."

"That's the conviction we'll need in court."

"The men were Delta Force." Her eyes were laser direct. "They were sent to kill him."

He leaned back in his chair. Caroline had told him the same story. The woman he had been married to for all those years was also one of the most honest women he'd ever known. And his dealings with both Agent Booth and Dr. Brennan told him exactly who they were, what they stood for.

But if he believed these people, he was headed into very dangerous territory. They all were. His gut was screaming to him a warning.

"Dr. Brennan? I think we need to work on the story."


	6. Obsession

**Obsession**

If Agent Seeley Booth's paranoia and penchant for secrecy in the Foster investigation was catching, Dr. Lance Sweets had a full-blown case. It hadn't taken Deputy Director Stark's pronouncement that Booth had been taken into custody nor the addendum that Dr. Temperance Brennan had been detained for questioning to make him believe there was something to the agent's need to keep a lid on the information in the case. That Booth had been shot up in his own home had caused Lance Sweets to believe in the boogieman.

He just didn't know who that boogieman was.

Meeting Miss Caroline Julian just for a casual conversation was fraught with suspicion and worry. So much so that he had checked carefully for a location far from the Hoover and his normal meeting places, far from electronic surveillance, far from the ears of the boogieman's associates, whoever they might be.

He wasn't going to take any chances with his life or with the life of Miss Julian. Fear had married caution and their child was born as fully-grown paranoia.

So he sat at a picnic table, his senses on full alert, the gun he had so proudly earned weighing heavily at his side. He tried to keep an eye out for other watchful eyes watching him, but he felt overwhelmed just trying to remain calm in the face of everything that had happened.

A boy just at the edge of the park was practicing wheelies with his bicycle. Helmetless and unafraid, the boy was trying to pull up the front wheel of the bike while balancing on the back wheel and propelling himself with an almost frantic pumping on the pedals. Time and again the boy got the bike up and pushed it forward only a few feet before losing his balance and starting over. His _**obsession**_ coupled with his unerring belief he could perform the stunt made him a fascinating study.

"You thinking of re-joining the circus?"

Caroline Julian stood just to his right and behind him and he hadn't heard or seen her coming. And Miss Julian was hard to miss.

One eyebrow was cocked with a hint of mockery, but he knew that she wouldn't have come to this place without constantly looking over her shoulder. They were all a little jittery these days.

"I was just. . . er. . . watching. . . ."

She harrumphed. "I know what you were doing, Sweets." She lowered herself to the seat next to him, facing toward the boy still trying to perfect his wheelie. "You were wishing you were that boy over there not worrying about the next big thing to come down the pike."

He wanted to refute her comment, but the truth had a strange way of strangling anything he might say.

The boy was now trying for a hand stand with the bike and Sweets wondered how long it might take for him to turn that into a somersault or go head over heels onto his head.

"I remember when we had pogo sticks and a skateboard was a piece of wood you simply screwed some wheels on and had at it."

He had a radical image of Miss Julian careening down the street on a homemade skateboard. The pogo stick, however, was just too far outside his imagination.

"Booth's being moved to a locked hospital ward at Central Detention."

Caroline's news was not unexpected but it still sickened Sweets. "So the judge refused to allow him to be transferred to a hospital for that bone graft procedure."

Another strike against the good guys, Sweets thought, but he didn't share it. Sharing was a luxury these days, even with people you could trust like Caroline Julian.

"Dr. Brennan's been placed on administrative leave for refusing to cooperate with the FBI."

His news wasn't unexpected, either, but it still elicited a dour expression from Caroline.

He looked off at the boy who had been trying to become the master of a bicycle. Sheer repetition and persistence should be enough, he thought. But the boy had abandoned his one _**obsession**_ for the swings.

"I don't know," he started. "I never thought. . . ."

But the words were difficult to say and he found himself unable to air his doubts and his fears even to someone like Caroline.

"All my cases with Booth and the squints for the last 6 months have come under review," Caroline said. "I've been asked questions by your FBI about Booth's state of mind and if I thought he were capable of murdering three of his own."

Caroline's whole posture screamed defeat.

"I was asked the same questions."

The sounds of the summer day and of children playing around them couldn't break through the gloom between them.

"What happened to right makes might?"

It had been a mantra of his since he had first read of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Seeley Booth had made him a believer in the white knight who could right wrongs and found power in his actions rather than with his sword. It sounded a bit naïve now, a bit more hopeful than it had a right to be.

"Right now it's might makes right. And whoever's swinging that sword's got in in for all of us."

Caroline unfolded herself from the picnic bench and put a hand on his shoulder.

"You watch your back, cher," she offered. "Because believe you me, there's no one there you can count on to watch it for you."


	7. Eternity

**Eternity**

She sat at her computer staring at the screen, but not really seeing it. Instead all she felt was the weight of the job, the heft of the responsibilities that seemed poised to crush her.

The lighting in the room at this time of day made it possible to see a hint of her face reflected back at her in the computer screen. Mostly it showed her in a shadowy, murky way, indistinct much like the world she had stepped into that morning.

Hitting a key on the keyboard, the Jeffersonian logo disappeared to give her another look at the DNA profiles she had called up. The one matched perfectly, but they had expected that. The other one?

Murky and indistinct and it would take an _**eternity**_ to find a name to match.

The DNA matched one of the Delta Force operatives who had most certainly killed Wesley Foster. One of the Delta Force operatives who had shed a great deal of the DNA she could identify: Seeley Joseph Booth. But the Delta Force operative was just that, an operative with no name.

Cam closed her eyes and rested her forehead in her hands. They had threads that might lead them to the people behind all this, but they could weave nothing together. In the meantime she had had to do something that she had only once thought about doing.

She had fired Dr. Temperance Brennan.

It had been couched as an "administrative leave" and had it not been so seriously wrong, she might have asked the board if they were planning on eliminating Dr. Brennan later in their own version of a hail of bullets.

As for Dr. Brennan, the woman had recoiled as if hit when she had told her, had pronounced, "You won't solve murders without me," had been escorted to her office and then out to her car by the same security that had greeted her daily.

Had left with nothing more than a single boxful of items that marked over 10 years of work there.

Cam opened her eyes and stared at the monitor. Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man within the Jeffersonian logo looked back benignly, the epitome of proportion and balance. Somehow, she thought, nothing really was in perfect balance anymore.

"Hey, Dr. Saroyan?"

Wendell Bray stood at her station, his pale, lean features belying the hearty smile. The jacket he wore to mark his position as a consultant hung far too loosely around his frame. "I'm looking for Dr. Brennan to sign off on these limbo cases. I checked her office, but it was locked."

Board members had reminded her she was the boss, and now, looking at the young man who had come to the Jeffersonian to intern under Dr. Brennan, who had kept working there because of the woman, was now looking to her to be the boss and to tell him the bad news.

And she hated it. Hated her job. Hated herself for what she had done and what she would have to do.

"I can take those, Mr. Bray."

She caught the slight puzzlement in the squint of his eyes as he handed her the folders.

"Is Dr. Brennan taking some time off to sort through this mess with Booth?"

A simple "yes" would be easy. The "mess" was growing in complexity and seemed to be imploding friendships in the same way it was destroying lives and careers. But the truth was hard, especially with someone like Wendell.

"Dr. Brennan is on administrative leave," she said quickly. "Dr. Edison will be taking over. . . ."

"You fired her?"

"Administrative leave. The Jeffersonian board. . . ."

"It's the same thing as firing her."

She stopped. She couldn't argue with Wendell. Even if they were to straighten out the mess, as he called it, there was no guarantee that Dr. Brennan would return, even if the board wanted her back. And there was no guarantee there would be a lab to come back to. Far too many of the interns and the key people at the lab were loyal to Dr. Brennan.

"She gave the board no choice." She added softly, "If we have any hope of helping them, we need to keep working."


	8. Gateway

**Gateway**

Two large slabs of plywood stood where her front door had once been, secured to the frame of the house with a substantial padlock. She read the legal notice over the shoulder of the U.S. Marshall who was opening the lock, the notice that warned against trespass and promised a hefty fine and jail sentence for anyone foolish enough to get caught breaking the seal.

Inside, the air had a stale, stagnant quality. Whitish powder covered much of everything in the entranceway. She hadn't examined much of the damage as she had waited with Booth for an ambulance that night and now with only a little light streaming in from undamaged windows, she couldn't see much, but the destruction seemed far less complete than it had that night.

"You said the office was down this hall?"

The marshal maintained his back to the living room angling his body in such a way as to funnel her down the hall. The hallway, usually lit during the day by the glass door at the rear, was shuttered and darkened by another plywood slab marking its place.

She led the way, stepping over the remnants of the front door and splinters of the banister. Even in the dim light, she could see the gaping hole in the wall leading upstairs.

"Is it locked?"

She shook her head, a wave of anger causing her to remain mute, and opened the door. The room had been untouched by the firefight, but her desk drawers were left slightly ajar and she thought she saw a white smudge near the lock on the desk. One by one she opened each drawer and took out the papers she needed: notes for her latest book, insurance numbers, notes for a paper she was writing. The final drawer wasn't really a drawer, but a panel that revealed the very solid door of a safe.

She ran through the combination quickly, turned the handle and felt a tap on her shoulder.

"I need to open that, Doctor."

For a moment she hesitated, then shook her head and stood slowly.

"It's because there could be a weapon," he offered. "Just a precaution."

She waited as he opened the door and peered inside, a small flashlight zigzagging along the contents.

"You need it all?"

Some of her more important papers were in a safety deposit box at her bank, but these would see them through the next several weeks if not months and she didn't want to leave them behind for the FBI to peruse.

"It's better if I take it all."

He grunted and she took that as approval and bent to the task. These papers she stuffed into her messenger bag along with other items: Booth's childhood photos, her winning medal from a science fair, the house title, their marriage certificate. She stood when the safe was empty, slinging the bag over her shoulder.

"I need to go upstairs and get some things from my daughter's room."

That had been the sticking point with the Marshals and even though she had received permission to retrieve items from her own house, she hadn't been given full access. The marshal played his flashlight along the stairs.

"I don't know," he murmured. "The railing's shot to hell and there's no telling how damaged those stairs are."

She wanted to tell him she could see the damage, she had been in worse conditions, had evaded an army by clinging to a rock face for over an hour, but she took a deep breath and a different tack.

"My daughter is having difficulty sleeping with everything that's gone on."

That part was true even if it wasn't the only reason she wanted to go up the stairs. While she didn't have time for a full reconstruction of what had happened there, the stairs obviously had been used by one of the Delta Force soldiers and Booth had blown out the wall to slow him.

"I don't know, Dr. Brennan. It looks a bit dicey to me."

"I take full responsibility." She took another breath and tried the words the lawyer had suggested. "Christine cries because she doesn't have her favorite toy and she's been crying herself to sleep since this all happened."

The words proved a _**gateway**_ to the marshal's sympathies and she gingerly began the climb up the stairs, her flashlight washing the stairs in a blue light. The marshal was only a few steps behind.

Only the landing appeared to have seen any damage as she made the turn toward Christine's room. White dust on the floor betrayed an intrusion up here as well and she worked quickly to enter the room and find Christine's daycare knapsack.

"I can't handle it when my kid cries," the marshal offered as she tried to corral a few of Christine's toys with a book or two and into the knapsack.

"You got a another bag or suitcase or something?"

She gave directions to the attic ladder at the end of the hall and listened as the footfalls faded away. Then she checked the hallway before taking the half-dozen steps to the linen closet and the recorder that had been connected to the security cameras downstairs.

She was back in Christine's room before the marshal returned.

He led with the suitcase as she negotiated the stairs, her blue light still playing across the steps when she saw the tiniest fragment of hope. A misplaced foot, a hand to steady herself, and she captured the sliver of wood before slipping it into the kangaroo pocket of Christine's bag.

"You all right there?" The marshal helped her find her feet, helped her negotiate the last few steps.

"I'm fine," she huffed. "I was clumsy as a child."

He gave her a look. "Those stairs are in bad shape, Doctor. I hope you got what you needed."

She fought an urge to brush off the dust clinging to her pants. "So do I," she said and thanked him.


	9. Death

**Death**

Jack Hodgins knew a great many things. Doctorates in entomology, geology and botany demonstrated his expertise in those fields. His encyclopedic knowledge of the natural world had been born out of his love for science and learning in general. Then there was the unnatural world of government and power-hungry individuals bent on manipulating the truth for their own devices; he knew that, too. He knew how his little boy loved to explore and had a deep appreciation for insects and arachnids, especially the cobalt blue _Haplopelma livudum_ in the Ookey Room at the Jeffersonian. Michael Vincent also loved applesauce and ice cream, butterflies and Dr. Brennan's iguana. Jack Hodgins knew as much as a father could know about a toddler who had a spark of natural curiosity and drive.

And Jack Hodgins knew Angela Montenegro.

She was a subject he'd studied for 10 years now and he secretly thanked the universe for making her a part of his life. Tonight she was far away and almost out of reach despite being only a few feet away. He'd volunteered to help her weed their garden after dinner, a task that had become more of a game of tag with their son Michael Vincent who had a keen obsession of ripping off the blossoms on the zucchini and tomatoes and peppers.

One of them had made the mistake of showing him that the zucchini flowers were edible and Michael Vincent had begun his own culinary adventure by stripping off the blossoms, chewing a few before gathering them in a bunch to present to his mother.

Angela, for her part, had that vacant look tonight that meant that Jack might just need to set his hair on fire to get her attention.

"Ange?" he called as he scooped up their wayward son and swung him to his shoulders, far out of reach of the beleaguered zucchini plants. "Angela?"

The look, part stare, part zone out, had become more frequent of late as she tried to deconstruct the encryption on the Crius files. At least once a day, almost like clockwork, she would lose concentration on what was before her and slip into a zombie-like state as she tried to consider additional ways to break the code.

This time he tried a hand on the shoulder. "Ange? Let's go for ice cream. Michael Vincent is buying."

The magic words earned him a small giggle of joy from his son and an excited clapping above his head. But Angela had still not rejoined them. He shook her again.

"Ange? Let it go. Walk away from it for a bit." A month of obsessing over the decryption key had done little more than rob her of sleep and an appetite. "The computer's working at it and we'll get something when we get something."

But her pain wasn't so easily erased. "I just keep thinking about what it would be like if you were in jail," she said finally. "How much time you'd lose with Michael Vincent."

Their son had already wrapped his arms around his head and Hodgins wondered how much longer they'd be able to protect him from the realities of the world. In their line of business, they were confronted with _**death**_ daily and despite that, Angela had not quite lost her sensitive heart. But now his crazy, open-hearted artist wife was hurting.

"Ange, it's all right," he soothed, "Brennan knows how much you're working on this. She knows."

"What happens if we do unlock the computer files?"

He helped his wife to her feet. "We hold onto the information until we know who's behind this."

"And then we expose them for what they are."

It was the best answer he had and yet he knew it wasn't enough. They walked quietly back to the house, Michael Vincent supplying the soundtrack as he counted down all the ice cream combinations he wanted to try. Jack squeezed Angela's hand before releasing it and lifted his son from his shoulders. Michael Vincent scampered toward the front door, grabbing his plastic dragon along the way.

"Jack?"

He knew that tone and turned to her, anticipating the worst.

"I don't know if I can go back."

He didn't have to ask what she meant because he knew her so well. And he didn't try to reassure her because words alone could never erase what had happened.

"Cam didn't even fight for her."

Jack Hodgins knew so much, but he didn't know how to heal this wound. All he could offer was the small comfort of his own loving embrace.


	10. Opportunities

**Opportunities**

They'd had had so few _**opportunities**_ that he tried desperately not to blink for fear that he would lose a second of time with her. The bullet-proof glass had a tint to it, casting living color into flat, washed out grey. He wished he could see her eyes in the natural light where the pale blue mixed with the golden highlights that still spoke of magic to him. One of the times she was here to see a prisoner, she'd come reluctantly, uncertain she wanted to be in the same room as her father much less the same building. He'd given her a gentle push, even went so far as to ask Caroline to give them some privacy and personal contact in the rooms reserved for detainees and their lawyers. But now there were no friendly prosecutors; an inch thick bullet-proof glass divided them and the phone he used to talk to her smelled of hopelessness and despair.

"I left some photos of Christine with the guard," she said, rushing everything she could into the 15-minute time limit. "And the lawyer is going to bring you some insurance papers to sign. And I left you some citrus. You need to eat more oranges and grapefruit."

She looked tired and thinner, the gray tint of the glass casting a pallor on her features.

"Bones," he said gently, "I'm okay."

"I talked to the prosecutor and the doctor, but they're still planning on moving you at the end of the week."

Being arrested and arraigned for the murder of three FBI agents might have caught him by surprise, but he tried desperately now to anticipate each new step. It was a battle of a different sort, but knowing and anticipating meant the difference between life and death.

"They figure that if I can walk I can be in the general population."

He caught the flicker of doubt and he tried to reassure her. "I've been in worst situations, Bones. It'll be fine."

She had to know he was lying.

He asked about Christine and Max and she answered by rote, the glass divide reminding them both of how little privacy they really had. She asked about his wounds, his diet, his medication.

Every word was measured and weighed against the people around them, even, "I miss you. _We_ miss you."

She leaned her head against the glass, pressed her palm against the surface and he mirrored her actions in reply.

"No touching the glass."

The order was barked like so many of the instructions here, and he could do nothing but obey. He leaned back and watched as she straightened as well.

What was theirs was _theirs_ and he'd be damned to let them lock that away as well.

So in the short time remaining to them, they said nothing, only looked into the gray face of the other, their silence speaking for them in a way that words could not.


	11. 33

**33%**

_**Author's Note: **__Thank you for the reviews, follows and favorites. I do appreciate them. I'm especially fond of the rants._

_I'm sorry about the mini-hiatus here, but the computer died and needed resuscitation. This week's updates may be spotty as well since I'm on the road. But I usually compose in my head, so there is that small plus in a road trip. Hopefully I'll have enough juice left in me at the end of the day to tap away at the keyboard with something worth reading. _

oOo

"What the hell happened?"

The mild expletive was delivered like the rest of the question, in a measured tone that belied the menace behind the words. He had expected the phone call practically the second the report hit his own desk given the sensitivity of this operation. Over time he had learned to anticipate the problems, cut off the angles, but this particular case was presenting a few more twists than expected. But nothing was beyond his management. He eyed the stack of folders on his desk and kept his own tone even.

"A judge signed the court order."

"Is he one of ours?"

"No, sir."

A guttural utterance on the other line punctuated the man's displeasure. While they could only claim some _**33%**_ of the judges and prosecutors in one judicial district alone, the man on the other line automatically expected to hold sway in all the courts. Somehow the good doctor had found a sympathetic judge outside their influence and had earned admission into her own house.

"Do we know what she took?"

He had the list in front of him, the marshal's signature scrawled on the receipt along with the autograph of the good doctor. He read through the list again while answering.

"Nothing of value to us. Book manuscript and notes, a list of phone numbers, email addresses, some personal items. Legal documents. Photos, a geek medal from some high school science fair." He found it interesting what some people locked up in their home safe. "Clothing for their kid. A few toys and books."

"Nothing else?"

He'd wondered why she hadn't asked to retrieve clothes for herself, but he kept that information to himself. Some women loved to shop and the doctor had the means. "I don't think we have to worry about this, sir. The marshal was with her the entire time."

There was a short silence on the line as the man took in the information. "And what about the other thing?"

That had been a surprise as well, but he'd carefully monitored the situation. "Ruckland Labs? She took in a green jacket, striped. . . ."

"I don't need details."

He caught a hint of annoyance in the voice despite the distance, a sense of impatience. This was never to have gone as far as it had.

"Apparently she brought in the clothing from that night and they found nothing useful." Hard science trumped beauty and brains, apparently. The good doctor had even paid a premium to rush the order at the lab and got nothing useful in return. "Three sets of DNA, one a match for the agent, one for the doctor and one for a juvenile female who has a 99.9% chance of being their child."

"No loose ends."

"None." This one they could chalk up to luck. He'd paid to look at the results early, nothing more. The murmur on the other line was all the approval he would get.

"And the Jeffersonian? Are we secure there?"

Keeping tabs on them had been easy. "Nothing new. We wiped the files, are monitoring all computer and phone traffic. Nothing so far. From where this stands right now, I would still suggest that the agent taking out our men might have been to our advantage. Dead men don't talk."

It was a sore point, a loss of valuable men, but all he got was a hint of disapproval in the silence.

"And she's out of there."

It was a statement, a foregone conclusion. Luckily, accomplishing that had been relatively easy, despite the woman's reputation. The rational scientist was anything but rational when it came to her husband and the board had been backed into a corner by the actions of their world-renowned scientist. "We've closed all the doors."

"That's what I expect."

It was the closest thing to a compliment or even a thank you. "We'll keep an eye on the Jeffersonian, but it seems that they've moved on. There's nothing for them to examine, there's no evidence left. Our labs are handling the murders, but we're not pushing on those because you said you didn't want this to go to trial."

There was that silence again, that void that a less experienced man might jump into and fill with idle talk or reassurances. But he knew better; his job was to get results not speculate.

"Good." He overheard the man on the other line talking to someone, ". . . tell Jenkins I'll. . ." before the words became muddled. Within a few seconds the man returned to their conversation. "No trial is best. We don't need him spouting theories even if he can't back them up. What about closing the final door?"

That door was still slightly ajar there. He shifted in his seat; he couldn't control everything. "He spiked a fever, a secondary infection of some kind. Best estimate is he's in the general population in a week to ten days. Two weeks on the outside."

He heard the exhalation of breath, the unspoken comment. "Keep an eye on that." The man cleared his throat as if to make sure his intentions were clear. "I want an end to this."

The phone went dead well before he could say anything more.


	12. Dead Wrong

**Dead Wrong**

To her he was Mr. Bray and to him she was _as she always had been_ Dr. Saroyan.

He hadn't minded that she had reverted to the formal address, almost felt better in the distance that it afforded them both. Dr. Saroyan. Mr. Bray. Colleagues, but nothing more.

He talked to her almost daily, the formal titles a reminder of how things were here at the Jeffersonian: boss, employee. Potential fire-_er_, potential fire-_ee_.

The reminder was there in each interaction, and he had several with her during the workday. Reviewing case reports and examining reports on limbo cases kept contact constant throughout the day as he matched records to the cases and checked for accuracy in the conclusions.

And she was always Dr. Saroyan, and he was always Mr. Bray.

The polite formality of their titles kept the distance that had formed after Dr. Brennan's dismissal. It wasn't that he was angry with Dr. Saroyan, just disappointed somehow. Dr. Brennan deserved better. He had no illusions about her: Dr. Brennan was a tough mentor, demanding and brilliant, sometimes cold and demeaning, but she'd become something else to him over the years that realization had been as surprising as the embrace at her house.

And then there was Booth. The man deserved better from her as well. He was an old, old friend. Somehow firing Dr. Brennan had seemed another way for Dr. Saroyan to distance herself from Booth and it just hadn't seemed right to him. Booth needed people to rally around him and support him now and Dr. Saroyan seemed to have forgotten that.

But polite formality or not, he had a job to do, so he traced the familiar path to the autopsy lab to find Dr. Saroyan at the table stapling close the chest of another victim.

"Do you have a minute, Dr. Saroyan?"

He kept conversation to a minimum these days, not because he feared making a misstep and earning some kind of reprimand, but because keeping everything professional felt somehow easier.

"Mr. Bray."

"I have two DNA reports here that aren't referenced to any other case on file and I can't cross match them with anything on the computer because there's no case file numbers." He held the anomalous reports apart from the other papers in his hand. "I found one in the Gilbert folder."

Her attention was on closing the large Y incision on the chest. "What DNA report?"

He read the key information. "DNA was taken from a light green woman's jacket and green multi-colored sweater, pants and boots. The DNA was collected from blood spray resulting from a gunshot." He looked up. "Several sets of DNA were identified and matched, but the names are missing and I can't find the evidence reference numbers."

"Then there's this second report. Another DNA analysis of a wood splinter shows a match with an unknown, but again, I have no name and there's no case file on the computer. In fact," he said, the morning's search thorough if unsatisfying, "there are no open cases on the computer that fit the details contained within these reports."

Dr. Brennan had taught him to look at everything not once, but as many times as necessary and he had that morning, yet nothing in his files or in the binders matched the information on these reports. The discrepancies had certainly earned his attention, but not Dr. Saroyan's. She continued to work on the corpse.

Had it been Hodgins he might have teased about this being sloppy work. He might have scolded one of the interns or pointed out the truth of the matter to Dr. Brennan, but this was Dr. Saroyan and he wasn't willing to risk his job on a joke.

He waited.

With the tail of the incision closed, she looked up and gave him a long, cool look. "I put those files in there for a reason, Mr. Bray."

He didn't understand. "If you know the case file numbers, I can find them on the computer. . . ."

"They aren't on the computer, Mr. Bray."

"If you want, I can put them on. . . ."

"I don't want them on the computer."

Working at the Jeffersonian with some of the best minds in the country had sharpened his thinking, but he wondered if maybe the chems fighting his cancer or the medical marijuana was taking the edge off his mental prowess.

"Dr. Saroyan, I know that I'm new at this job, but I don't really understand what you're trying to tell me."

Brown eyes seemed to plead with him for understanding, but he was far from comprehending the mystery of the files or why she wouldn't want them computerized with everything else.

"Can you think of a reason why we might not want something on the computer?"

"Hackers." He'd seen what Christopher Pelant could do and even Angela at her best hadn't been able to keep up with him. "A favor for someone?"

"Two very good reasons."

He stood with the pages in hand, still not understanding. Then something in the orphaned reports struck him as odd. The tested clothing had been carefully described down to the size of the boots and the splinter had been identified as coming from a maple banister. By themselves, those weren't so odd. But when his mind went to the DNA results, how one set of DNA showed a 99.9% chance of being related to two of the sets, how one set had been unmatched, he looked up at Dr. Saroyan.

And he knew.

"I would like you to keep the hard copies of those reports someplace safe until we need them," Dr. Saroyan said in even, clipped tones. "Maybe keep them where they were for now." She began to pull off her gloves. "Do you understand, Wendell?"

He nodded numbly, the responsibility hitting him as she moved away from him and toward her computer. A dozen questions came to mind, but he kept them to himself, gave her a stiff nod and headed toward his office.

In the privacy of his office, he tried to salvage his scattered thoughts, tried to think of the best place to squirrel away the files, but decided the Gilbert file made as much sense as any. The reports disappeared into the file folder and the file folder disappeared into the growing crop of files in the drawer.

But he needed to do more than simply hide away reports; he had to re-think this entirely. One of his oncologists had told him that dealing with cancer required a different mindset; think of yourself as a survivor rather than a victim. Maybe that's exactly what he needed here, he thought, a different mindset about Dr. Saroyan. Sometimes you don't really know what's going on in someone else's mind. You might think you do, but then again, he thought, you could be _**dead wrong**_.


	13. Running away

**Running Away**

He hated grapefruit. A mountain of sugar couldn't get him to eat it.

Bones knew that. He'd said it enough times over the years. The only thing he could figure was she was so upset that she had gone deep into squinty mode and when she did that, no amount of arguing could cut through her rationalizations: _eating grapefruit was healthy, therefore, he should eat grapefruit._ She had every right to be upset, every right to be as squinty as she wanted to be given the circumstances.

But he still hated grapefruit.

He was fighting to stay out of the general population while she was. . . well, he really didn't know what she was doing, although he trusted her to be doing something to free him. Despite her squinty attempt to keep him healthy, the two grapefruits sat at the table near his bed, misshapen softball-sized fruits that he hadn't even been able to give away to the orderly or nurse who came in to see him.

The rest of her package had been welcome. Photos of Christine, a short note of encouragement from his grandfather, a postcard from Parker. Oranges.

Bones had also written him a short note, but like everything else in the package, it was poked and prodded and scanned by the guards before making its way to him. The note offered up nothing concrete as to what the lab had found or what any of the squints were working on because she knew just how little privacy he had. _They_ had.

So sitting in bed, peeling the oranges and re-reading his treasures, he felt the same kind of grief he had felt the summer he had lost Bones and Christine. Then his squinty partner had solved the problem of Pelant by _**running away**_ and keeping in contact with Angela through the language of flowers.

Now there seemed to be no language they could converse in without someone overhearing it, and without her he felt cut off from the world around him.

He rubbed his leg, the tender flesh still aching. In trying to delay his release into the jail's general population, he had been exercising against doctor's orders, pushing up his blood pressure and his heart rate. But he'd pulled the stitches and got an infection and because of the pain and fever, he had earned himself another reprieve from being moved

He knew that wouldn't last long, knew he could do only so much before he got over the infection and they moved him into the jail's population and he had to take his chances.

And he didn't think they were good.

That's why he spent his time this morning enjoying what little glimpses of his other life he could. A nice, juicy orange, a picture postcard from his son, a note from Pops. And lots of photos of his daughter. Christine smiled back at him, her genuine smile carefree and innocent.

And then the nice, juicy orange added a little something to the photo he was enjoying.

He cursed, the drop of orange juice marring the otherwise perfect image of his daughter at the park. A swipe of his hands only spread the juice.

"Shit."

In his mind he was apologizing to his baby girl, apologizing to Bones for marring the picture when he noticed something odd about the wet spot.

He could see letters.

They were transparent and gray, a faint image of _oc_, but the letters were clear and recognizable.

Bones had written it.

He'd thought it odd that she had sent him some photos printed on flimsy paper, but he hadn't cared so much because Christine was with him in some small way. But now he wondered if his brainiac bride had had a different purpose.

Sacrificing a segment of orange to the cause, he squeezed it over the paper then smeared the juice and discovered more letters. Which turned into words.

Which turned into a treasure trove of information.

Popping the last of the orange into his mouth, he grabbed a grapefruit and began to peel it, taking the larger segments and squeezing them over the paper and spreading the juice. Words appeared on the soggy paper, tart words, Bones' words, which he devoured hungrily. Each photo offered up another message from his wife, another insight into what they were doing to help him, what they knew about the case against him, what her contacts in the FBI and Justice were saying.

And how much his squinty, beautiful wife loved him.

He certainly didn't doubt her love, but each photo-turned-letter just reminded him of how deeply she felt, just how tireless she could be.

And just how brilliant she truly was.

The first pages were dried by the time he finished the last, Christine's image a bit faded on the mottled paper, but still a reminder of what they needed to work toward. He squeezed a drop of juice onto the first page and discovered the words stubbornly remained hidden within.

She'd pulled out a bit more of her squinty magic.

He read the last page again, watched as the page dried and the words disappeared, keeping their secrets until the next delivery from his wife.


	14. Judgment

**Judgment**

Not all spiders spun webs. Wolf spiders sought their prey on the ground. Trap door spiders dug holes then created dirt doors hinged with spider silk to lie in wait for their prey. Others merely hid in flowers to catch feeding insects by surprise.

The diversity of nature was absolutely one of the reasons he was so attracted to its study. But despite the delicate and intricate webs that some spiders spun, they were still the tiny equivalent of sharks or wolves or lions.

It was something he was constantly reminded of as he watched the camera catch his _Haplopelma livudum _at work.

"You ready?"

Angela had Michael Vincent in hand, their son's eyes wide and bright and focused intently on the _Theraphosa blondi _in the large aquarium on his back wall. He'd taken it on loan from a local the natural history department, its long hairy legs a fine deterrent to Cam's visits.

"Hey there, buddy. You want to see him up close?"

Michael Vincent gave him an awe-struck nod, his eyes never quite leaving the movements of the tarantula as it sidled toward its burrow. Hodgins took his son's hand and walked him closer, then swung him up on his hip to give his son an eye-to-eye view of the golden spider.

He could forget the world around them as he got lost in the pure wonderment of his son who murmured with delight as the spider gave him a little show of its dexterity as it climbed the small branch that was in the aquarium. As the tarantula made its way higher and higher, he could feel the thrum of excitement in Michael Vincent as the creature neared them.

"Oh, my God," he heard murmured behind him.

"He's behind glass, Ange," he insisted, his son's interest in insects and reptiles seemed to be matched only by his wife's revulsion. "There's a heavy top he can't push through."

"Jack."

He turned, another reassurance ready, when he saw what Angela was referring to. The computer that had been set up to monitor the daily habits of the cobalt spider at the other end of the Ookey Room had been taken over by a list of file names. Angela was scrolling through them, the length of the list truly impressive.

"No wonder it took the computer so long." The endless stream of files continued off to the side as another window appeared with the sequence of numbers and letters and symbols that had unlocked them. "The CIA uses codes like that," he added.

"So we're looking at the CIA as well as the FBI, Congress and the DOD?" Angela's voice barely broke a whisper, but he could hear her concern.

Michael Vincent continued to lean into the spider enclosure, mesmerized by the large tarantula. Hodgins adjusted his boy in his arms. "Don't you want to see what's in those?"

Angela's eyes were taking in the treasure trove of trouble, her silence a sure sign of just how worried she was.

"Ange, we've got to figure out what we've got." He shot a look at her. "Don't you want to find out if they had that minor State Department undersecretary silenced when he was going to reveal how the government was secretly. . . ."

He didn't get very far in his attempt to persuade her as the screen suddenly came alive with a flurry of documents on FBI official letterhead.

"What did you open?" he asked.

She shook her head, unable to speak.

"Try that one."

He pointed to a file just under the one she had opened. Michael Vincent began to protest being torn away from the golden tarantula.

A single photo appeared: a long-range photo of a well-dressed man crossing in front of a door front that could be in any city in any part of the world.

"How about that one?"

Again, a flutter of documents appeared, these with the State Department official seal.

"That one."

An accompanying photo showed an older woman embracing a younger woman and a head shot of the same woman in judicial robes. Another photo showed the younger woman's face badly beaten, her eyes swollen shut.

Something clicked and Hodgins pointed toward the photo. "I know that woman. She sat on the 12th Judicial. . . ."

Michael Vincent was pulling at his shirt collar, trying to get his attention, but the wealth of nefarious activities recorded then stored at Crius was just too much for the conspiracy theorist. A label on one file seemed far too intriguing. "Open that one, Ange."

This time the computer spat out three photos. Hodgins didn't recognize the people in the first two images, but the third one was all-too-familiar.

"Oh, God," Angela said.

But it was Hodgins' turn to stare at the image and wonder what kind of Pandora's box they had just opened.


	15. Seeking Solace

Seeking Solace

The snap of the rubber band brought him back to focus.

". . . It's just feel overwhelmed sometimes by the idea that we're going to have over a hundred and fifty people at this wedding and all I can think of. . . ."

The words didn't capture his attention, but the constant pull and release, pull and release of the rubber band in Agent Welky's hands did. Other agents picked through the assortment of stress relievers in his basket, the squishy penguin, the rubber ball, the worry stone that was a tranquil blue glass with a small well where the thumb could rub away tension, but this agent had brought in a rubber band which was taking the brunt of his anxiety.

". . .I keep telling my daughter that it would be far easier for her to elope. . . ."

A good psychologist would listen, but he was having a hard time with Agent Welky's parade of anxieties. Each one earned a large float followed by a full band of complaints, and yet, paying attention was next to impossible.

"So what do you think?"

He was so focused on the rubber band's stretching routine, that he almost had no idea that Welky had addressed him. Asking the man to repeat his problem was just not an option, so he settled for a well-worn psychological tool.

"The question is, what do you think of the situation?"

That earned him the scrunch of the eyebrows and a new exercise in torture for the rubber band. Maybe poor listening was why psychologists first did that, turned the question back onto the patient, he thought, although the technique did force the patient to re-examine their own thinking. Sweets tried to re-commit his focus, but it was as hopeless as he watched the Jillian Michaels-caliber workout of the rubber band.

Fieldwork was for field agents, he'd been told, and as a psychologist, he was much more valuable working up profiles or seeing agents. After wading through his twentieth performance review, he simply couldn't get worked up about Agent Welky's problems.

". . .And then this thing in the bureau. When an agent goes rogue like Booth did, that. . . ."

Sweets had been finding himself drifting in and out of the agent's story, the drone of his voice creating a luxurious cushion of white noise to fall into when a single word, like the snap of the rubber band, brought him back.

"Rogue?"

Only now did the agent stop the stretching of the band between his hands. "Yeah. This thing with Booth. You see something like that happen, to someone like Booth who was at the top of his game and you wonder what might make a person like that snap."

"Are you afraid that you might go rogue?"

He'd heard enough in the hallways, had enough comments hurled past him to know that Booth's fall from grace had set many of the bureau's agents on edge. Welky seemed almost insulted that someone had suggested he might go down the same path that Booth had despite having brought it up.

". . . It's not that I'm as tightly wound as Booth, but really, when the. . . ."

Enough time had passed to embolden someone like Welky to address Booth's situation. But sitting here listening to someone denigrate Booth only reminded him of what had been lost when his friend had chosen to face down intruders bent on killing him for what he might have dug up on the McNamara case.

He interrupted Welky's mudslinging. "People are innocent until proven guilty."

The rubber band snapped again and Welky looked at him with a mixture of certainty and sympathy. He leaned in.

"Doctor, the FBI doesn't arrest anyone without good reason."

Arguing wouldn't change Welky's mind; Sweets had had far too much experience these days with people who thought they knew the truth. This time he leaned back and brought his steepled fingers to his chin. He still knew how to fight back without leaving a visible bruise.

"Perhaps what we need to work on your own feelings of inferiority."

oOo

A trip to the diner only brought on his own negative thoughts as did a visit to the Founding Fathers. He felt orphaned without the team and those places only reminded him of just how much had been lost. The only place he could imagine going to was somewhere he had never been before: Paradise Lost.

The name alone seemed to spell the current state of his world. He remembered the story Booth told him of the relationship he had with the proprietor, the same man who had officiated at his friends' wedding and the man's bar seemed as good a place as any to go to lose himself, seeking solace in a drink.

The door opened to a long bar and despite the hour, the stools were mostly vacant. As his eyes adjusted to the lighting, he could make out shadowy outlines in the back. He slipped onto one of the barstools. The bartender, the dark-haired man he remembered from the wedding, was at the other end of the bar talking with a customer, a blue collar type. Sweets loosened his tie and considered removing it entirely when the bartender saw him. "You're one of Booth's friends," he greeted him as he placed a coaster in front of him. "I met you at the wedding."

"Dr. Sweets."

The man studied him beneath dark eyebrows. "You're a coroner?"

Sweets shook his head. "I'm a psychologist. A profiler." He considered the man. "You're Aldo. Booth's former confessor."

"The operative word being former." He tapped the bar. "I sell spirits now. You'd want a mixed drink."

The thought of having a Wild Caboose appealed to him, but this place spoke more of beer and hard liquor served straight. "A beer's fine."

He got a nod and in a few seconds, a frothy glass of beer. He set a $20 bill on the bar and wrapped his hand around the glass. "I suppose you've heard about Booth."

That earned him another nod. "It's best not to believe everything you hear."

His own rubber band of tension relaxed. "I can't seem to get away from people who have already decided that Booth is guilty." He sipped at his beer. "What's worse is that I want to help Booth, but I feel like I have to walk a very narrow line at work. And I can't see anyway of helping him right now."

Aldo leaned on the bar. "Are you here looking for platitudes?"

Sweets felt the rubber band of tension stretch. "I feel helpless knowing that my friend is in trouble and I can't help him."

The bartender gave him a knowing nod, and for a moment Sweets felt the man understood his frustration.

"Maybe there's a way to help, but it hasn't presented itself yet."

It might have been his own advice, he thought, as the bartender made his way to the end of the bar and pulled another beer. The TV above the bar showed the pantomime of a baseball game, the Nationals tied with Chicago in a game played through a foggy mist. To his right, other patrons were talking, but the voices blended together into brown noise that seemed to only color his mood.

He finished one beer and started another, sipping at the amber fluid as he watched a Cubs player aim a hit through a hole in the infield to break up the tie. Even the lowly Cubs could win a game now and then, he thought.

A few patrons walked behind him to the door, their calls of good-bye acknowledged by a wave from Aldo who was talking with someone at the end of the bar.

Sweets considered his beer, considered the reasons for making the trek down here. He was looking for something, looking for answers, but he couldn't see a way to help Booth beyond telling the FBI what he knew which was far less than what Dr. Brennan knew. And if she couldn't convince them, he didn't hold out much hope for himself. He'd offered to help Dr. Brennan, offered his services to the Jeffersonian, but so far, he'd drawn blanks.

Nothing was right. Even his beer just wasn't what it should be.

He looked at his watch and considered calling it a night when the door opened and two more patrons shuffled in.

And he recognized one of them: Max Keenan.

Before he could invite the man to sit with him, Max gave him a warning look, a short shake of his head and breezed past him, a man of similar vintage in tow.

A glance toward Aldo told him this wasn't the first time Max had been there. While he tried desperately not to, he did steal a look, but saw little in the shadowy light. The two men were hunkered down over beers, deep in conversation, but that's about all he could tell.

He turned to the TV to watch the final attempt by the Nationals to battle back from a 7-2 deficit but his mind wasn't on the game. When the Nat's centerfielder sent a towering pop-up into foul territory for the third and final out, he considered ending his own torture when he found Max standing next to him, reaching for the pretzels. The other man had vacated the table and was already headed toward the door.

"Can't win them all," Max said. He kept an eye on the door as the other man had turned and was waiting on him. "Even the underdogs win a few now and then." He set an envelope on the stool next to Sweets. "Hundred years plus drought? Cubs' fans blame it on the goat, but I'd say they just need a better team."

With a wave toward Aldo, Max turned to leave.

Sweets tried not to, but his hand immediately went to the envelope and he pocketed it the moment he heard the door close.

Aldo gave him a good, long look.

But Sweets didn't need a word of encouragement or even directions. He knew what he could do to help.

He finished his beer, gave a nod to Aldo, then headed out into the night. 


	16. Excuses

Excuses

"I don't need excuses, I just need cause of death."

Knee-deep in a cesspool of muck, Dr. Clark Edison little cared for the tone in the agent's voice, nor for the insinuation that he could magically pull out cause of death from remains so deeply coated with sludge. Determining sex and age had been tricky enough given the condition of the remains without an FBI agent hovering overhead demanding him pull an answer out of thin air. Or was it thick, gooey gunk?

"It's difficult to come up with a definitive conclusion until we've cleaned the bones," Dr. Saroyan weighed in. "Dr. Edison can't be expected to give you much until we've gotten the remains back in the lab."

She was also knee-deep in mud, treading carefully in the ditch with him and Dr. Hodgins, one errant step away from losing her footing on the slick bottom, and yet she was holding firm, her eyes never leaving the agent's.

The agent tapped his pen against his paper pad and gave them a grim shake of his head before wiping away an imaginary smudge from the top of his shoe on the back of his leg and stalking away.

He caught Hodgins' glance toward the agent, but the entomologist bent back to his work, sifting for particulates and insects in the goo they'd been standing in. For her part, Dr. Saroyan was reaching under the body, trying to catch the strap they were using to lift the body before putting it on a backboard and pulling it from its muddy grave.

"What is this?" he asked aloud. "The third FBI agent who has no idea of what we do and how we do it?"

He got no answer, but he expected that. Dr. Hodgins wasn't talking much to Dr. Saroyan and despite the newly-minted professionalism that had descended on the Medico-Legal Lab as a result, even he was feeling the constraints of sticking to business.

"For once I'd like to see one of them come down here and help us," he muttered.

That only elicited a glance from Dr. Saroyan, but Hodgins did take up the thread if not the cause.

"The fewer people down here, the fewer ways to contaminate the scene."

It was an answer he would have expected from Dr. Brennan, but she wasn't there, even in spirit. He bent to the backboard; trying to lift the body and slide board underneath was presenting a problem in the muck. For each inch of success, they'd earned another twenty pounds of gunk on the board.

"Dr. Hodgins?"

Dr. Saroyan's plea brought a reluctant Hodgins to the problem. He took one look, called up to the techs and had them toss down a rope.

"Get the loops around the body," he directed as he pulled the rope in. "Then we loop this through," he added as wove the rope into the loops and directed the men above them to pull.

With Hodgins' help they got the backboard under the remains, a body bag around that and the might of the techs above them to pull the ungodly mess from its muddy grave.

"That's what I like to see," Clark observed, "cooperation."

His comments were mostly directed at the techs who were relatively dry and free of the mud, but his comment earned him a look from Dr. Saroyan. Dr. Hodgins had already returned to his collecting of muck-covered bugs and bits.

He sighed. It was going to be another long slog through another case.

oOo

At one point he had been the poster child for professionalism in the workplace. It was as if he had crafted a model for how a forensics lab should operate: pure professionalism out of respect for the dead. No extraneous talk. Proper attire. Clear, unobstructed focus on the task at hand.

Which forgot all about the living.

He'd lasted in one lab for less than two months because he'd never appreciated that. People coped with the messy business of death in countless ways: black humor, outrageous clothing, conversations about anything but death, singing to the bodies. One man actually made a toast to each deceased, his words a kind of requiem for the lost life.

The key was that the living required a kind of proof of life for themselves.

He had thought the mighty Jeffersonian should be different. Dr. Brennan was _the_ expert that all the other experts deferred to. Dr. Saroyan was one of the finest coroners in the area. People like Brennan and Hodgins who held multiple doctorates must be hyper-focused, super-professional.

But even the scary smart were only human.

Oh, Dr. Saroyan still greeted everyone and appeared to be the same as she had always been, but something was different, off somehow since Dr. Brennan had been dismissed. And Hodgins and Angela? Nothing but professional. Which was nothing but odd.

If anything, he was the one who was now trying desperately to escape these deaths by any means necessary.

"The muscle attachments on the bones suggest that this man was possibly a runner." He felt the anterior surface of the bone in his hand. "Maybe he was running along the road, a truck hit him and he fell into the ditch." He set the bone down and picked up the next. "Stranger things have happened."

"Or it's possible," he continued, warming to his story if only to fill in the silence, "he was dropped from an alien craft at a great height into that ditch because the fractures to the body are quite extensive."

It was his way to bring Hodgins into the conversation, let the thought of an alien abduction end the awkward silence on the platform, but the doctor refused the invitation.

"Why did you say a truck?" Dr. Saroyan looked up from her own examination. While the cleaning process had removed both the mud and some of the tissue, she was examining what remained of the internal organs.

"Uh, the. . . the fractures are extensive, from just below the patellas to the shoulders which is consistent with the grille of a large truck, a semi, I would think." Dr. Brennan, he knew, would have been more precise. "He would have been facing the truck."

"If that's the case," Angela offered as she paused in photographing the remains, "wouldn't he have just jumped out of the way?"

It was a mystery within the mystery of the man's death that they still needed to unlock. But he felt like he was making headway on the case despite the tensions around him.

"Are you sure it's a truck grille?" Hodgins asked.

He looked at the chest which had borne the brunt of the abuse and began to doubt himself. He'd only been talking to fill in the silence, but now those words seemed to boomerang on him.

"It's just a theory," he offered. "The damage is consistent with such a collision."

"The alien space craft would have been better," Hodgins added.

oOo

He'd filled in for Dr. Brennan before, but now things were certainly different; she was gone.

The Jeffersonian hadn't imploded and it hadn't shrugged its shoulders and given up, it had simply moved on. Everyone was replaceable.

But he knew, just as he knew bones, that replaceable didn't mean interchangeable. One man's ulna wouldn't take the place of another man's or woman's, in this case, and right now he was battling more than the loyalty of the people who had worked with Dr. Brennan.

He was battling the abilities of the woman herself.

He had always prided himself on his thoroughness, but even that hadn't been enough on this case. Angela had run the scenarios for him, even researched various truck grilles for him, but the body's injuries just didn't match. He'd tried modifications to grilles, smaller trucks, even the back ends of vehicles from 1906 through the present day and he still couldn't explain the injuries.

Other vehicles, weapons used multiple times—damn it, he had looked at just about everything he could to explain the injuries and come up with the means of death, but he was stymied.

He'd even gone so far as to ask Wendell Bray to look back through Dr. Brennan's old cases and research notes to find out if she had run across anything like this. But even the former intern had no luck finding anything.

Dr. Brennan would probably walk in, take one look at the bones and tell him what weapon was used, how many blows had rained down on the victim and how the man had ended up in the ditch.

She was just that brilliant.

That's why he gave out little hope he'd be named head of forensic anthropology. Oh, they'd let him continue on the research side, handling the old bones, something he truly enjoyed, but he imagined the board was already looking into Fletcher from Stanford or Hamstead from Toronto as possible replacements for Brennan. And maybe that was for the best.

Replaceable but not interchangeable.

Besides, he loved research and the autonomy he had in his own lab. That was the mantra in his head as he was examining the bones again, running through the various scenarios they had already gone through, when Dr. Saroyan entered the Bone Room.

"Agent Morris needs an update on the murder weapon. You said that cause of death was the tip of the rib breaking off and puncturing the heart."

He repeated her description with the exact rib and the size of the fragment that had stopped the heart, the details that were critical in court. "I can tell you what killed him, I just can't tell what was used to break that rib in the first place."

Running through the catalog of injuries, he explained why the grille of a truck could and couldn't cause the bone damage. Then he eliminated a few of the other possibilities the same way. "I've never seen injuries like these before," he concluded. But he was battling a look of disappointment.

"Dr. Hodgins said that there particulates recovered from the mud came from the usual by-products of combustion engines," he quickly continued, "as well as local flora."

"Which tells us what?"

He tried to suppress his sigh, but failed. "I'm not really sure. I was hoping the particulates would have told us more, but they just didn't."

This time she sighed.

"I've gone over the bones at least a dozen times and I've got nothing new," he said. "I've used every resource at my disposal and I've come up empty."

But things were different here at the new-old Jeffersonian. Very different.

Dr. Camille Saroyan, her arms crossed in front of her, let him know exactly how different the lab had become.

"We don't need excuses, Dr. Edison." Her brown eyes bored into his. "We need to know the weapon." 


	17. Vengeance

Vengeance

Something was wrong.

Maybe it was how he survived 20 years in prison, maybe it was just some innate feeling, but Herman Kessler knew something was wrong.

That prosecutor, Caroline Julian, had worked out a deal that saw him living in a condo somewhere in Maryland with a core of 3 U.S. Marshals shuffling in and out of his life keeping him in check.

Checkmate was more like it.

Hell there was no telling when _they'd_ come after him, trump up some other charges against him, or put him in a situation that saw him splattered across some remote highway. He wasn't willing to wait for _that_ to happen.

"I'd like to see that agent who brought me in, that Agent Boone." He was just finishing up the breakfast that Hernandez had brought, a sad looking egg and bacon sandwich and a soggy hash brown patty and orange juice so sharp he thought he might cut his mouth on it.

"Booth," Hernandez corrected. "FBI Agent Seeley Booth." The marshal stood up from the table, folding the newspaper he'd been reading. He'd had restrictions on news outlets, too, but he didn't care much about what was going on in the world. An occasional headline only confirmed his feelings. "You won't be seeing him."

Kessler had been watching Miguel Hernandez long enough to know there was more to the story. The man had broken off his reading of his favorite team's win over the Pirates. "What about that woman that was with him? His partner? Brenner?"

Hernandez was about to say something but it was Marshal Cory Bateman who answered for him. "She's not going to see you either."

"That lawyer. The prosecutor? Caroline Julian." Kessler kept his eyes on Hernandez. "Could I speak to her?"

"We're not treating you well enough?" Bateman was as evasive as they came. And unreadable. "You have a court date on the 17th. You'll see the DOJ rep then."

"But she made the deal."

Hernandez shifted on his legs, looked down at the paper then at Bateman. The marshals left too much silence between his question and their answer.

"You've been assigned a different DOJ liaison," Bateman said. He looked at Hernandez as if the put an exclamation point on the statement. "It happens all the time."

But he knew differently.

oOo

He'd spent 20 years of his life plotting vengeance. At first he had had some vague idea that he wanted to free himself, but as he read more about the McNamaras and learned more about them, he narrowed his focus on the father and daughter. Time erased one of his targets, but he still had the daughter in his sights.

The daughter and the judge.

Despite killing them, the FBI agent had been gentlemanly with him. Considerate. And the partner, Dr. Brennan, had laid out his trail of evidence leading to the McNamaras and the judge like she had read every single one of his thoughts.

They'd let him live.

Wasn't there that old Native American custom that if someone saved your life, you were forever in their debt? He'd spent so much time in prison planning on one end for his life, that he had given very little thought to a life beyond iron gates and razor wire. Agent Booth and ADA Caroline Julian had given him license to think beyond his cell if only for a little while.

But something was certainly wrong.

The way Hernandez had corrected him on Agent Booth's name gave him something to consider. Was Booth injured? Dead? Had the forces that had supported the McNamaras somehow gotten to him? And what was it he'd been told about Dr. Brennan? Hadn't someone told him that she was an author? Crime novels? Or books about dinosaurs?

He'd have to look it up when he got out.

Because he certainly _was_ going to get out of protective custody. Given everything, he certainly didn't feel very safe anymore. He had no proof. Just a gut instinct.

It had taken him 20 years to exact justice. He figured he had only a few days before they would come for him to even the score.

He had to get out and get to Agent Booth. Or his partner. Or that lawyer.

He just had to. 


	18. Love

Love

_Love__ means never having to say you're sorry._

_Bullshit. It had to be the dumbest line he'd ever heard._

He swiped at the remote and turned the noise box into a silent black hole then glanced at his daughter. Temperance had fallen asleep during the movie, the papers she'd been reading on the floor at her hand.

Love, he thought, as he considered her sleeping form, meant having to say you were sorry as often as needed.

She'd come back from the lawyer pleased that she had won a small victory in being assured that Booth was going to be placed in protective custody when he was transferred from the hospital ward of the jail. Then, after playing with Christine and feeding her, giving her daughter a bath and a bed-time story, she had gone right back to work going over the details of his case, trying to find anything she could use to free him.

Unfolding himself from his chair, he walked stiffly toward her and gently rubbed her shoulder. "Honey?" Exhaustion brought on by worry and work, made rousing her a bit more difficult than usual. "Honey? You really ought to go to bed."

"What happened in the movie?" she asked as she slowly rose. "I fell asleep."

He chuckled at her statement of the obvious and helped steer her toward the bedroom she shared with Christine. "They lived happily ever after."

"Really?" She blinked her disbelief.

"They had to," he reassured her. "Why else would they call it, 'Love Story'?"

oOo

They had lived in shifts of sorts the past couple of days. Temperance took the day, waking with Christine and spending much of the day with her, or putting her in daycare as she made the rounds of lawyers. He trolled the night looking for an old acquaintance. Both of them were trying to pull off a miracle.

He held little faith in the system that one minute had Temperance framed for murder and the next hauled Booth in for three. Both of them were straight arrows, law and order types who believed in the system, believed in truth, even if that wasn't what justice was all about. They were good people who deserved better.

All those years away, and now all these years here, with her and Russ and the families the two of them had cobbled together, had cemented just how much he wanted his children to be happy. The irony, of course, was that Russ, the son who had been in and out of jail much of his adult life, lived life on the straight and narrow, and his daughter, who worked for the FBI as a consultant had had more scrapes with the other side of the law in the last couple of years to almost put her on an even footing with her brother.

And he wanted to do whatever he could to help her.

He _did_ have some skills in the area. He _was_ Christine's children's rhyme: _Father, teacher, con man, thief. Husband, liar, Indian chief._

Except for maybe the Indian chief, he played all those roles, although outside of Gila Bend, he had convinced that woman to buy the handful of turquoise he'd been hawking to get them out of one ghost town and into another.

Skills he had. But what he really needed was a little bit of help.

oOo

The cool night gave way to a cooler interior, scented with stale beer and the drone of conversation in the back. He nodded to the bartender, ordered a beer, and headed back to a booth.

He'd left a sleeping Temperance, one arm around Christine, the efforts of the last few days and sleepless nights catching up with her. It wasn't late, exactly, but he certainly felt his own need for sleep tugging at his bones, when his appointment slipped into the bar, then into the seat across from him.

"I got your message," he said, his voice barely above a whisper. "And here's _my message_: No."

Max brought the bottle of beer to his lips, his movements measured and sure. The other man looked into the dark of the bar, his hands fidgeting on the table.

"You want a beer?" Max asked as he set his bottle down. He waved toward the bar and signaled for another beer. "It's the least I could do since you've come all this way."

The other man leaned back, shaking his head. "No means no. I mean it." The bartender delivered the bottle and Max handed him some cash.

"Okay," Max said. The man across from him had seen some hard living, his face a road map of all the places he'd been. The shock of dark brown hair had given way to a fringe of gray. "I just need the papers you're holding."

If the man was agitated upon arrival, he was even more so at Max's suggestion. "No. I got to be this old by holding onto those papers." He took a long pull at the beer and set the bottle down before beginning his retreat from the booth. "Thanks for the beer."

"Marvin Beckett," Max said. "You've got access to a computer? You can do a search?"

The man paused, half out of the booth before he set his frame down on the bench again. "I haven't heard that name in a long time."

"I'll give you two more names to search. Garrett Delaney and Robert Kirby."

His companion leaned back heavily. "Is this meant to be a threat?"

This time, Max shook his head. "I'm too old to be making threats." He shrugged. "I need the papers. There's a good chance that the same people who shut you down are framing my son-in-law. I think it's about time to set the record straight."

"You couldn't draw a straight line with a ruler," the man hissed.

Despite his age, Max wondered if a right cross to the jaw might persuade the man. Instead, he took another swallow of his beer and considered his options.

"When was the last time you saw your family?"

His question had the same effect as a punch.

Max stood and placed a hand on the man's shoulder. "If I get the papers, I can put you in contact with your son." He patted the shoulder. "He's got to be twenty by now."

"Twenty five." The man eyed him. "What do you get out of this?"

Max narrowed his eyes. "A chance to tell someone I'm sorry." And with a wave, he left the bar. 


	19. Tears

**Tears**

The woman in the photo, with caramel skin and long, jet-black hair, leaned forward on her arms, her expression intent. The image, captured somewhere over the shoulder of her companion appeared to catch her in mid-conversation at what appeared to be a restaurant. Unlike many of the other photos they had, this one required no Google search nor facial recognition program to determine her identity. They had worked beside the woman in the photo for years.

"Sweetie?"

Her friend remained frozen, staring at the photo, her silence unreadable.

"It doesn't mean anything by itself."

It was more of a vain hope than a certainty, but she didn't want to cause her friend any more pain. Brennan now radiated a depth of sadness that was more profound than last summer's, a depth of loss that seemed to have left her so brittle Angela was afraid the slightest touch might shatter her. And sometimes a vain hope was far better than no hope. She tried again.

"The photo doesn't mean anything by itself, Brennan."

"I don't know what that means."

Brennan's eyes met hers and she saw that hint of anger that seemed to be fueling her these days. It seemed sometimes to be the only thing fueling her.

"It means, Dr. B, that Cam might have been photographed, but it doesn't meant that she was blackmailed." Jack caught her eye and looked about as helpless as she felt. The photo they found among the Crius images had a way of doing that to them. "And if she was, we don't know why they would have wanted to silence her."

"We know that the photo was taken a few years ago," Angela added.

Brennan held the photo for an instance longer, than discarded it, tossing it to the side, before picking up another from the folder of images harvested from the Crius files. "We need to determine how these people were blackmailed and who benefited from their cooperation." The old Brennan had emerged, the one who would stop at nothing to find the truth. "That's the person we need to find."

oOo

They'd ensconced themselves in the bowels of the Cantilever Library of American University. Hodgins' family money might have built the place, but that hadn't given them any special privileges here. She had had to doctor a few ID cards and manipulate the scheduling of study rooms to give them the privacy they needed. The summer lull in classes had added to their solitude as did the balmy weather a floor above them.

Summer session had a relaxed air that gave them ready access to the basement. The janitor's closet was some 20 feet away and boxes of out-dated books, broken desks, and unused study carrels lined the walls. Here they were surrounded by relics of an analog world: a pair of lumbering machines as well as an entire cabinet of both the _Washington Post_ and the _New York Times_ on microfiche.

"They found that having the archives online trumped these," Hodgins said as he waited on the first microfiche machine to warm up, "but we'll be able to look at the stories without having them manipulated or altered online."

As far as conspiracy theories went, it was one of his milder ones of late. "I've rerouted an altered IP through several servers and bounced an asymmetrical code alongside our searches to prevent anyone from tracing it," Angela offered.

"See this photo?" Hodgins was having a field day with all the photos she'd retrieved from the locked Crius files. "That's the fourth, the son of the third, Jonathan F. Pierce. Father was going to be named to the Federal Reserve board, but before the nomination could even be announced, he withdrew his name. No reason given." Hodgins wound up. "The man was well-known for supporting reforms for the banking system. It's another sign that the economic collapse of the banking system could have been prevented if people like Pierce were involved in overseeing the. . . ."

Angela looked at the photo as her husband wound through his conspiracy rant. A quick computer check showed Pierce to be a man with a strong reputation for honesty and fairness, but he had faded from public view soon after the withdrawal from the nomination. "There's nothing on the son."

"Because he gave into their blackmail and got the son's name cleared."

"Cleared of what?"

While Brennan might not know all the people they were checking, she was very good at keeping Hodgins in check. Anytime he went on one of his wild conspiracy rants, she could reel him in and even stop him with a question or a look. It was a good balance; Hodgins might know more about the ways of the world, but in the battle of objectivity vs. subjectivity, the score was pretty even.

"Ange, can you find something?"

She was on it before he asked, checking for the young man's presence on social media and sites that held snapshots of old web pages.

As she waited for the computer to spin out information, she gave her friend a good, long look. Brennan was looking between her microfiche reader and the folder they'd given her, with photos and documents they'd harvested from the Crius files. She knew the fluorescent lighting didn't do any of them any favors, but Brennan looked particularly off color, her eyes betraying too little sleep and too much worry. Angela wondered just how far past exhaustion Brennan could go before she would break.

Then the computer spit out its results. Or non-results. "Nothing." She sat back on her chair and stared at the computer screen. Despite taking several pages from Christopher Pelant, she was finding more cyber walls than cyber information.

"He was arrested for trespass and criminal damage to property," Brennan announced along with a date from the _Post_ article. The microfiche screen blurred as she located additional information. "No follow-up story the next day."

"He got in trouble with the law and his father had to bail him out by giving up the chairmanship and altering the course of U.S. economic policy as we know it. You know who benefits from reforms? The fat cats in. . . ," Hodgins was about to wind up again when Brennan stopped him cold.

"Who benefits if a D.C. coroner doesn't bring to light the effects of brain injuries on soldiers who've served in Afghanistan and Iraq?"

The image of Cam among the Crius photos had never been too far away from any of their thoughts. The photo itself held its own special place where Brennan had tossed it earlier among the piles of the mini-mysteries they'd partially deciphered and the ones that remained untouched.

"We don't know if that was the purpose of the photo or not," Jack countered. "For all we know, they started a file on her in the event she pursued her campaign."

"Who benefits?" Brennan asked again.

For the answer, Hodgins took a deep breath. "The administrations who ordered men into battle unprotected, The Department of Defense, the Veteran's Administration, various DOD subcontractors. Her investigation could have embarrassed any number of people involved in the war effort for not paying attention or reacting fast enough to the problem." He shook his head. "Cam could have been targeted, but they might never have pulled the trigger on her."

"It makes more sense to prevent brain injuries or to diagnose and treat them early," Brennan offered. "She should have pursued it."

"She was the reason we all came back," Angela reminded her. "We saved her job."

"Maybe they just found a different way to discredit her." Hodgins' mind was never far from a conspiracy these days. "Or maybe they strong-armed her to fire you."

It was something that they all must have been thinking at one point, but Brennan shook her head, her jaw askew as she processed the photo and their past with Cam. She picked up the photo and murmured, "There's one way to find out."

But she didn't elaborate.

oOo

It was all about secrets. Who was sleeping with whom. Who gambled. Who didn't. Who loved their child, their spouse, their parent more than their career. Who had financial troubles. Who had stumbled in the past.

It was all about secrets and how they could be turned into gold for someone.

Some of the secrets were obvious—clandestine meetings, police mug shots, intimate candids—while others required more digging, more sifting through public records.

She stood to stretch, the all-nighters she'd pulled during college seemed somehow easier than this. Both Brennan and Hodgins were still at work, Brennan pouring over the files while Hodgins was locating some information on the microfiche that he was printing to add to the growing pile of evidence.

Yes, they had lots of evidence, but they weren't sure who was behind it all.

"This is Dr. Randall Olms," Brennan announced as she pulled a photo from the folder. "He was working on a promising drug for cystic fibrosis, but it was never approved by the FDA." Angela caught her eyes and saw the flicker of understanding. "The FDA later approved a similar drug from a different pharmaceutical company."

"What drug?" Hodgins swiveled on his chair. "When was that?"

Brennan supplied the name and a time frame and Hodgins began digging through his microfiche files. "With something that significant, it could mean millions of dollars to the company that comes up with it." Hodgins' screen showed the blurry black and white streaks as words screeched across the screen then came to rest only to dart away again as he found the right screen.

"I read the research studies," Brennan added. "Dr. Olms is brilliant."

Angela did her own search, finding the information about the newest edition of the drug. Classico Pharmaceuticals had laid claim to the treatment and from its position on the company's website, the drug was helping cystic fibrosis patients lead longer, more productive lives.

"It's here," Hodgins reported. "In the Science News section of the _Times_. 'Vivelux Pharmaceuticals reports final trials on their new drug treatment for cystic fibrosis. "Results have been consistent and promising," Dr. Randall Olms said.'"

"That doesn't sound like he was changing the world," Angela countered.

But Brennan put it into a perspective that she hadn't considered.

"He changed my niece's world."

oOo

Once in an art class, the teacher had given them each a canvas with long **tears** in the fabric and instructed them to paint a scene to incorporate the rips. Then it had been a fun exercise, a chance to let her imagination loose. She'd wrapped each tear with people trying to hold together the fabric, each struggling with their own demons or with the size of the rent, but each working together to make the canvas whole again by drawing together the edges against the black holes.

They seemed to be living out her art school canvas.

Hodgins had begun to load up the diaper bag with the files. _"Who wants to steal dirty diapers?" he'd pointed out. _Brennan had shouldered her messenger bag and was considering the files still left on the table. She reached for the photo of Cam. "May I take this?"

Her hand remained poised near the photo and for a second she wanted to talk her friend out of doing anything with the photo.

There were enough black holes to guard against.

"Take it, Dr. B," Hodgins said. "Do you want any of the others?"

She shook her head, hugged them both, then disappeared into the darkened hallway.


	20. My Inspiration

**My Inspiration**

If Dr. Lance Sweets was anything as a professional, he was thorough.

He religiously kept up with his professional reading, followed-up with all of his FBI clients, and triple-checked his reports for accuracy.

So when Max Brennan left him an envelope through a strange encounter certainly meant to bypass his daughter for Dr. Hodgins, Lance Sweets did what a thorough man would do.

He peeked.

Granted, he resisted the temptation that night and well into the morning, doing his best to distract himself from the mystery inside. But when lunchtime hit and he considered his options, he realized that his diner companions had decreased significantly and chose to do the one thing to feed his growing curiosity.

The names on the list offered up an intriguing appetizer that took him to his computer rather than the diner. Within minutes, the mystery of the envelope had only increased.

oOo

It didn't take a trained psychologist to know that Max Brennan had given him the envelope so that Dr. Brennan wouldn't know about it. Whether Max had done so because he didn't want her to know that he might have information relevant to Booth's case or he simply wanted to spare her additional pain, he could not be sure. The relationship between father and daughter could be as treacherous to navigate as a series of hairpin turns.

Of course, tapping Hodgins for his knowledge of conspiracies made sense if tapping into a person's paranoid ideations made sense at all. Obviously, Max trusted them. And given how sparingly the man gave his trust that had to say something.

Maybe he was reading too much into this. Dr. Brennan's father had only given him the envelope with a veiled instruction to get it to Dr. Hodgins. He'd never said anything about doing his own investigation. Had Max considered that?

He couldn't be sure. Being part of Booth's investigative team had given him certain license that had been rescinded when Booth had been arrested and he still seemed to be coping with the change in his status.

He missed fieldwork.

To be correct, he was not technically an agent. He was a psychologist who, like Dr. Brennan, gained valuable insights in an investigation by being out in the field. In so many ways he had welcomed opportunities to immerse himself in the home of the victim or interview people he knew so as to develop a clearer picture of the deceased and by extension, the perpetrator.

These days, of course, he was reduced to examining the paper versions of people—records, photos, correspondence—that made up the sum of one's life. His profiles were still spot on, but they lacked the thoroughness, the same insights that came with having tread the same pathways as the victim.

Or maybe he just missed being with Booth and seeing the world through his eyes.

Anyway, he felt a bit lost, a bit unsure of himself as he dialed Hodgin's number.

oOo

He barely waited as Hodgins ordered his food before springing the story on him.

"A man gives you an envelope with three names. One is a clerk for the District Court. The second is an FBI tech. The third is a reporter for the _Register_. What do they all have in common?" 

Hodgins just squinted at him. "What the hell are you talking about, Sweets?"

He started again, leaning in, his voice low. "Max Brennan gave me an envelope of three names. A clerk, a tech, a reporter."

While the riddle didn't get a reaction, Max's name did. "Where's the envelope?"

Sweets checked to the left, looked to the right, and then pulled the envelope quickly from his pocket and slid it on the table toward Hodgins. "You're **my inspiration**, Sweets. This could help explain so much."

The conspiracist opened the envelope and had the paper out before Sweets hit him with the other information.

"One of them is dead. One's missing and the other one. . . ," he stopped, his search had both surprised him and left him more nervous than someone like him should be.

"What Sweets?" Hodgins looked up from the paper. "Just spit it out."

"The third one doesn't exist."


	21. Never Again

**Never Again**

Four on his right, three on the left, five in front. Newbies behind. Three.

Always alert. _Always_.

And one thing repeating in his mind: Bones was wrong.

_Okay, Bones was never wrong about the important things: bones, IDs, which home insurance policy was a better value (she really read all that fine print), what Christine should eat (even if she didn't like to eat it), how to take care of his back._

But his wife was wrong. He _was_ in general population.

They lied to her, a smokescreen meant to appease her while they did whatever they damned well wanted to him.

Well, he'd done his best to delay his transfer. Six weeks. He was a Ranger, a sniper. Beaten, blown up, shot, tortured. He could handle this.

Don't look weak, don't look scared, don't look. But keep your eyes wide open.

And march. Stop when the man in front of you stops. Wait. The guard passed out people like cards, two to a cell. One left, one right. Then the march of the penguins began again. Stop. Deal more cards. March. Stop. March. Stop.

You're the next card that's dealt. Only one card this time. Turn left. Meet your new 8x10 room. A bed. Bottom bunk. A steel box bolted to the floor. Stainless steel sink and toilet.

And bars. Lots of bars.

oOo

From one cage into another. Dinner. Seventeen in front. Eight, nine sitting down. Four serving. Dozen, two dozen behind. A tray. Plastic plate. Plastic fork.

Mushy beans. Mystery meat. Potatoes. Bread. Orange for dessert. Army food rations were better. What he'd give for a meal at the diner with Bones.

He couldn't stop thinking about her. And Christine. Parker. Pops.

Yet thinking about them rather than this place was easier. And harder.

Sit down. Shovel in the food. Try not to actually taste it. Swallow the food along with any fear or anxiety.

Show nothing.

Accountant type next to him. Glasses. Next guy's a former trucker. Guy across is shaky, nervous. Newbies, attract one another like magnets. Stick together.

Look up. Keep an eye out for familiar faces. People watching him. Someone on the inside ready to take him down. It's like high school on crack; the cliques here will do more than just judge you out of their group.

They just might kill.

Gang bangers. Skin heads. Bikers. Repeaters. Losers.

Like him.

But not like him.

He's the man with a target on his back, the golden ticket to street cred. Or the means to end the Foster case.

Permanantly.

oOo

Night comes and the bird's back in the cage. Now he can stretch his thoughts as he's safe for the night. His cellmate is a 60-year-old in for bank robbery, half-blind and half-gone already, snoring like a stuttering jet plane.

Bones would have something to say about that. Tell him he's got nostra-calinori-phlebticcoccus or some such thing, recommend some kind of breathing therapy and cure the guy.

God, he missed her.

She'd been so damned relieved to tell him that he was going into the segregated part of the jail. Talked to everyone she could think of to get him moved. His partner, always protecting him.

And it didn't work. They played her, played him in this. Marked him.

He closed his eyes and tried to conjure up an image of his wife, a memory of his daughter and son, but the darkness refused him a small glimpse. Instead, he heard the soft mewling of what sounded like a cat in pain between the jet blasts above.

He knew that sound.

Put a man in a cage around other men in cages and sometimes the worst comes out. He knew the sound: liquid fear smothered. The accountant, maybe. Maybe the other guy. Nervous tic guy. One man's misery touched every other man's pain.

He listened to the jet engines above him, closed his eyes and counted the hours until morning.

oOo

He'd sent people here, came here to interview inmates. Can't make bail, threat to the community, capital offense, bail denied, you stay here, courtesy of D.C. until trial. But the trial began here. One inmate told him that if he could survive here, he'd make it in prison.

Guy hung himself.

He'd been in bad situations. Kosovo. Cape Town. Kandahar. Karbala.

He'd survived then, he'd survive now.

_Then_ he had had a strong sense of self-preservation, a desire to see his grandfather again, a need to see his son. Now he had Bones and Christine and Parker. Pops and his mother. Even Max and Russ and a sister-in-law and nieces. And the others. Friends so close they were really family. Now he even had a bigger reason to live, a greater purpose than to see Bones and his children, to see Pops and Max and his mother.

Justice.

He held no delusions that Lady Justice was truly blind, that she didn't somehow peek beneath the blindfold at times, but she stood no chance if the FBI was dirtym was circumventing the law and turning its own blind eye to the guilty. And all he could think of was **never again**; he wasn't about to surrender.

oOo

Breakfast. Tray. Scrambled eggs then toast. Bacon. OJ.

Shuffle down to the end of the line for the plastic ware. Shuffle to a seat.

He'd been spoiled by diner food, by his own morning prep. But he'd slept some, the jet engines shutting down last night as had the sobs of despair a cell over. Here he doesn't have a morning paper, but he has body language to read. The trucker shuffles to a seat next to him, acknowledges him with a nod. Then the nervous guy. Another look. Blank this time as if the boredom of the routine has already zapped his brain turning him into a jail zombie.

Then the accountant. His shoulders sags, his face betrays a restless night. He shuffles toward them like an old man.

But he doesn't quite make it. A tall Latino bumps him, sends the breakfast tray crashing to the floor and Ranger alert, he sees this isn't going to go well for the accountant. The slight is all it takes as the Latino swings his own tray into the man's face, sending the man and his glasses skittering to the floor.

It's an unfair fight and he doesn't have much use for bullies. Two of the Latinos are kicking at the accountant who's curled up like a pill bug, but each kick opens him up just a little to more abuse, more damage.

The guards react slowly as inmates crowd around the wreck of the man writhing on the floor and without thinking, he elbows his way into the thick of it with no thoughts about Bones or keeping his head down or surviving but only about how this is wrong and the guards aren't moving fast enough to break it up and how the cries of pain of the man on the floor are his own silent cries and he snaps an elbow into the solar plexus of one of the Latinos and then lands a punch to his throat as a roar goes up around him and he moves on the other Latino who's stepped back, delivers another kick to the prostrate accountant before whirling on him with a fist that catches his shoulder but doesn't stop him as he pivots, hiding his right that sneaks in low and finds flesh then bone and repeats two, three times before his left makes a J arc and snaps the man's head back and sends him crashing backward into the crowd that acts like a trampoline to send him back to him for another blow before he feels the weight of a body, then two, maybe three tackling him to the ground.

And the roar of the crowd goes silent.


	22. Online

**Online**

She didn't hate summer.

Parker was **online** talking to her via Skype and his comment didn't quite register with her until later. He was telling her about soccer, explaining how he had known that Brazil couldn't live up to its hype when he told her something that maybe only a teen would see.

"You guys haven't had it easy during the summer, Bones. You must really hate the summers."

She'd told him about his father, about how he was now in isolation. She didn't tell him about the fight in the cafeteria, that he was supposed to be in protective custody, didn't tell him about how he wasn't completely healed from the shooting at the house. Her father had coached her in what to tell Parker, had suggested broad strokes rather than fine details and she had fought her nature to relay some information to her stepson.

With Rebecca, it had been different, but only because she remembered what Booth had told her: parents should know more so they can prepare their children to deal with the consequences.

"Seeley's tough, Temperance. And foolish," was her comment after she'd given her the details.

The tone in Rebecca's voice came through clearly although she didn't quite understand what toughness had to do with a lack of judgment.

"I was always afraid he'd get himself killed, but this? This is just so," Rebecca blew out her breath, the sound amplified by the microphone on her computer, "so typical of him. Thinking he can take on the entire Chinese army and still be home for dinner."

If the earlier comment had been confusing, this latest statement only muddied Temperance's thoughts further.

"Booth did what he thought was right."

"That may be," Rebecca countered, "but you two sure as hell need to get as far away from Washington as you can."

Before she could point out that that would be impossible given where Booth was currently, Rebecca echoed her son's earlier comment.

"You two need a summer break," she said, "not a summer meant to break you."

oOo

She was mulling over Rebecca's words as she sat in the lounge above the Medico-Legal lab at the Jeffersonian. The designers had somehow failed to consider the heat during the summer months as the sunlight through the ceiling of windows only amplified the sun's rays. The last few days of rain had washed away the heat in the Washington area and the grey skies made sitting up here bearable.

"She's just gotten into the lab," the guard announced. He remained standing, shifting his weight from one foot to another as he ended the phone call and pocketed his cell. "It'll be a few more minutes, Dr. Brennan."

The man shifted his weight again, and she wondered if the reason were the right knee injury he'd sustained two or three weeks ago, when he addressed her again.

"You know, Dr. Brennan, if it were up to me, I'd let you into the lab and just wait for Dr. Saroyan, but the Jeffersonian has a policy in place." He shifted again, then leaned into the railing. "I mean, you wouldn't do anything to jeopardize one of their cases and, I don't mind telling you that they could probably use your help."

"Maybe when you and Mr. Booth get this all straightened out, you two will just go away for an extended vacation."

She heard Cam coming before the guard saw her, the familiar staccato rhythm of her heels against the floor announcing her presence.

"It's all right, Marty," Cam said. "I think I can take it from here."

The guard sketched a nod and retreated to the stairs. Cam said nothing until he was on the other end of the gangway.

"You shouldn't have come here. I've sent you updates."

Cam's pose was familiar. Arms crossed in front of her, body rigid. Only the tightening of her jaw gave away her discomfort.

She pulled the photo from her messenger bag and laid it on the table. Cam looked at it and shook her head. "It's a photo of me. So?"

"It was in the Crius files."

The stiff discomfort unraveled immediately and Cam leaned in and took the photo before sinking into a chair. "Oh, my God."

She watched as Cam studied the photo, a small part of her desperate for Booth or even Sweets to help her decipher the coroner's expressions.

"You can't think that I. . . ." Cam's head bobbed up. "I'm not part of this. I wouldn't do anything to hurt. . . . Oh, God. I wouldn't hurt Seeley. Or you. I never even knew about this until this whole thing just blew up."

Brennan waited, schooling her impulse to speak.

"This had to be taken two, three years ago, because my hair was longer." Cam looked up. "This could have been taken years ago. And the jacket? I think I still have it."

Years of interviewing suspects should have taught her the importance of patience, but she felt the pull of urgency with Booth still in danger. "Can you think of anything that might be connected to the McNamaras? Anyone who would benefit if you didn't investigate brain injuries in military personnel?"

She was reaching, looking for anything.

"Brain injuries?" Cam looked confused. "You think it's connected to that?"

"I don't know," she admitted. "I would like to think that as a scientist you couldn't be swayed by outside influences, but it is something that you seemed to feel passionate about until you didn't."

"I almost lost my job for feeling_ passionate_, as you put it."

Brennan stood, feeling defeated. "Maybe Hodgins was right."

Cam looked alarmed. "Hodgins knows?"

Brennan just stared at her.

"Hodgins, Angela. Right." She took in a deep breath. "So you have access to all the files?"

Brennan nodded. "It would have helped if you had been approached by someone, and had circumvented your duties, but there are other people I can talk to." She shouldered her bag. "I have to see Booth's lawyer."

"I heard he was placed in general population."

She sighed. "He got into a fight defending another prisoner and has been placed in isolation for the next week. No phone calls, no visitors."

"That's Seeley."

It _was_ his nature. The woman in front of her knew her husband as well as she did. Maybe better in some ways.

"I should go." She abruptly turned, thought better of it, and faced Cam. "Thank you."

"Dr. Brennan?"

She waited, uncertain she wanted to hear any kind of sentimentality from Cam. Emotions were only hampering her from seeing things clearly.

"I really wish you were still here."

The emotion she was trying to tamp down hit her hard and all she could do was to turn and walk to the gangway and the waiting guard.

oOo

Summers with her parents had offered up the typical fare: reading and biking, travel and camping, museums and amusement parks. Maybe the memory of those summers made foster care summers so torturous. Summers were spent in summer school or whatever enrichment programs she could find through her case worker or school counselors. Summers were to be spent with family and friends but in foster care, she had neither.

Old habits became new ones in college and in grad school. She'd filled in her summers with classes or field work, her eagerness catching the eye of professors who knew her brilliance combined with her work ethic made her invaluable. Working at the Jeffersonian, she continued the trend of working summers on digs or identifying bodies for one of a dozen human rights groups or for the U.S. government.

Until Booth.

Because of Booth, she spent part of a summer with her brother, Russ. Because of Booth, she'd spent a summer with a growing fetus inside her as they shuttled between apartments growing through the love that had always been there.

Then Pelant. One summer on the run. Another wanting to run. And this one?

Maybe Parker was right; maybe she _should_ hate summers.

oOo

The call came later that afternoon as she waited in Dr. Olms' office. She had already turned her anthropologist's eye to the photos on his wall, had already unearthed the tragedy in the man's life played out like a silent elegy through the images there, when Cam gave her a small sliver of hope.

"I remembered that a body was brought in that summer Booth was in Afghanistan and you were in Maluku. Car accident. The injuries were consistent with a front-end collision, but there were some shortcuts taken. We didn't do our own X-rays and all the tox reports were done at a different lab."

"Did you actually do an autopsy?"

"Yes." She could hear something in Cam's voice. Exasperation? "But the forensic anthropologist simply signed off on the bone damage and I had moved to that other lab so I really wasn't in a position to do my own toxicology screens."

"I need to see the X-rays."

"I've already sent them through to that email account."

This time she didn't have to think to thank Cam.

oOo

Dr. Randall Olms was a man in his 50s, but he looked older, worn down by time and grief. He waved her to a chair and sat down heavily at his desk.

"Your work on cystic fibrosis is brilliant," she began. "Your research on the mutations in gene G551D seems to be very promising."

The doctor bobbed his head. "I'm not sure how my research might interest a forensic anthropologist, but I am impressed that you've read my work."

"My niece has cystic fibrosis."

He bobbed his head again. "It can be devastating, can't it?

She agreed and indicated her real purpose for the visit, pulling out the photo of the doctor that had been taken from the Crius files.

The man blanched and leaned back in his seat as if to distance himself from the image.

She explained her purpose, acknowledged that she knew he'd given over the patents on his medicine because of that photo, knew that he'd lost millions for his company.

"I know what you've lost, Dr. Olms. My husband is in jail right now, accused of murdering three FBI agents that were sent to our home to serve a warrant."

Olms' jaw clenched as he considered her words.

"Booth was only defending himself against Delta Force operatives who were sent to the house to kill him because we got too close to something the FBI and others in the government don't want us to know."

Booth would rely on his gut, but she was relying on her observational skills, on rational thought and process, on the research she had on Olms.

And maybe a bit of instinct.

Olms rubbed at his face, pushed at his glasses and leaned forward.

"I didn't care if I made two pennies on that medicine," he hissed. "I didn't do it for that."

"I know."

She waited, her patience forced. Each minute ticked by with Booth in jail, in peril, and she felt a wave of helplessness try to break through her resolve. She glanced back at the photos on Olms' wall.

"You know?"

"Yes," she replied. "You've already lost a great deal more than just money or prestige."

Whatever arguments Olms seemed to be having with himself gave way, and he bowed his head.

"Dr. Olms?" She moved forward in her seat. "I have a daughter. _We_ have a daughter. Christine."

He pushed the photo away. "How are you any different than the bloodsuckers who took this?"

She gave him the only answer she had. "Because I'm going to stop them."

"You?"

As she laid awake at night, she'd gone over all the evidence she had collected, all the people whose lives had been damaged or lost because of the McNamaras and people like them. And each thought had been laced with worry for Booth, concern for her friends, fear for everyone's safety.

"I know that this has been going on for more than 20 years. I also know that people have been killed, their careers ruined, their lives changed because of greed or the insatiable need for power and control. They've used blackmail to force people to do their bidding." She took a deep breath. "They blackmailed you."

He leaned back. Glanced at the photos. "I've lost enough."

"You said that you didn't care if you made money on the medication you worked on. That's a selfless act, Dr. Olms. What you did was selfless and it lead to you losing a patent worth millions."

"How can you know?"

"The photo there," she pointed toward the one closest to the door, "shows an intact family unit and its placement suggests that it is important to you. But the photo over there, in a place where you don't have to look often, is of you and your wife. Clearly she is ill, possibly dying."

The man seemed to sink into himself and she felt a pang of sympathy for him.

"She _is_ dying." She hated the words, hated that she had to say them even if this was the rational approach. But she loved Booth and she would struggle through this without him.

"Help me stop them." She drew in another breath, readying herself to make a stronger argument when Dr. Olms stopped her.

"Don't give me the speech that they are a cancer and we must cut them out," Olms said. "You're right. When I lose Carmela, I'll have lost everything." He leaned in. "They've already killed me."

"What do you need to know?"

oOo

She left the air conditioning of Olms' office and felt the humidity instantly as she walked toward her car. Raindrops kept pace with her as she hurried to the car, reaching for the handle and sliding in just seconds before the clouds opened and the rain poured down. For several seconds she watched as the large drops collided with the windshield sending up waves of more drops that cycled down into smaller droplets.

She didn't hate summer. In fact, she rather appreciated the sudden summer storms that seemed to cleanse the air. She knew the scientific explanation for it, the convergences of moisture and temperature along three-dimensional fronts, but she sometimes liked the simpler explanation, the one that Christine would appreciate. Or Booth.

Olms had given her enough to think about.

She started the car, turned on her lights and wipers, and headed out into the summer rain.


	23. Failure

**Failure**

It hadn't taken long for the weather to turn from hot and humid to a heavy rain that danced across the roof and pummeled the large puddles forming under his window

After years of being locked up and focused on only one thing, the rapid shift in weather was fascinating. His students would often gaze out the window at the changes in weather—darkened skies, peals of thunder, flashes of lightning, a hint of snow—as if they hadn't ever experienced them before. He knew that they did so to break the spell of his lectures, to take back a bit of control in an uncontrollable world.

His reason?

He didn't really have one. The rain just appealed to him.

"You have your choice today," Hernandez said as he strode into the room. Hernandez had the habit of late of announcing himself with food selections for the day. "Roberts says you want Chinese so we've got menus from the local places." He spread the menus on the table. "Whey Chai's is the best of the lot. And they always throw in extra egg rolls."

He left his post at the window and bent to the menus, pretending to be interested in Chinese No. 1's selections. "Happy Family here, Happy Family there." He had a vague memory of some kind of rhyme his wife had had, but that was another lifetime ago. He looked up at Hernandez. "Whey Chai's?"

The look on Hernandez's face gave him away and he isolated the menu and began to look it over more carefully. He hadn't had food choices in prison, hadn't given much thought to it over the years, but now that he had an almost unlimited menu, he found that he had already gained a few pounds. Far too much of his day was spent considering his meals.

"Ah, how about the veggie egg fooyung and the crab rangoon?" He figured he could order off the menu for a whole month and not repeat any of the choices. "And tea. Unsweetened." The last part was for his growing waistline.

Hernandez took his order and retreated from the room, leaving him to watch the rain.

They were in a condo in what Hernandez had called a _financial bust ghost town_. He had had to research that one a bit, discovered that the developers had lost their almost-completed complex to the bank because people hadn't been buying luxury condos. In prison, by choice and by circumstances, he had been isolated from the news of economic highs and lows unless they concerned the McNamaras. But his time in prison had made him good at jealously taking in every tidbit of information and storing it away for future use.

That's why he had memorized the addresses of all the Chinese restaurants.

Later, he would add the addresses to the growing map of the surrounding area. Some of the restaurants had small insets of their locations and he'd begun to piece together where he was and how far away he was from the Jeffersonian.

That's where she worked.

He'd asked for some reading material, some current mysteries and by some bit of luck, Roberts had finally brought him a box of his wife's discards, some old Rex Stout paperbacks and more current ones, a couple by Sara Paretsky, a legal thriller from John Grisham, and a rather dog-eared paperback by Temperance Brennan.

He thanked the universe for Roberts' wife's taste.

One of his colleagues at the high school where he taught once told him that writers often revealed a great deal about themselves through their writing. He'd already gleaned from the author bio that she was a forensic anthropologist working at the Jeffersonian and writing mysteries on the side.

It was as good as her home address.

The mystery wasn't bad. The main character, this Kathy Reichs, did just about anything to solve the case—swimming though sewage, wrestling men twice her size, bashing down people's defenses with her brains. **Failure** was not part of her vocabulary. And Special Agent Andy Lister? If page 187 was any indication, he was Special Agent Seeley Booth's twin on paper and very important to the good doctor.

He hoped that Temperance Brennan was half as good as Kathy Reichs.

oOo

By his calculations, it was about 30 miles between his position and the Jeffersonian. By car, a 45 minute trip. By foot? He'd need at least 10 hours and a better exercise routine than pacing the condo if he was going to even do 3 miles an hour.

Getting out was trickier. The agents had let it slip that the condos on either side of theirs was empty as was the one below. Tunneling through the drywall in his closet to the other condo had been blocked by a cement wall between the units. He'd flushed the drywall dust down the toilet each morning or down the shower drain, but that had been a small problem. Cement was sure to cause plumbing issues even if he could tunnel through.

Then there was the ankle bracelet that monitored his movements.

To be honest, he hadn't paid enough attention to it when they attached it, his grief over his aborted suicide attempt clouding his thinking.

But any trip outside the condo required phone calls and pass codes that seemed to change each time. He couldn't figure out a pattern and they used voice recognition to disable its signal.

Once, when an electrical storm had hit the neighborhood, the monitoring station had flickered off, then on, sending off an ear-piercing alarm that had required a phone call and a visit from a technician.

Another problem.

He had a little time. Not a lot of it. Bateman was getting cagier in his comments and his own sense was that he didn't have 20 years or 20 days to make his escape. He had to work out the problems and get away soon.

That's what Kathy Reichs would do.

oOo

**Author's note: Thank you for the follows, favorites and reviews. I do appreciate the interest in this story. I'm trying to stay true to the characters and do some small justice to the cliffhanger that HH, SN & Co. left. I just hope they've got a way out of this.**


	24. Rebirth

**Rebirth**

"Dr. Sweets?"

He looked up to see a man filling his doorway, a jacket with the FBI letters emblazoned on the front the only clue that the man was with the bureau. If he had had to guess, he would have said the man had made a wrong turn at the Pentagon and showed up at the bureau to ask for directions back to the Marines Corps' barracks.

"May I help you?"

The mountain moved into his office and extended a hand that dwarfed his own as it crushed it in a handshake. "Special Agent Dan McCabe. Major Crimes. You're a psychologist." He finally let go of Sweets' hand. "With field experience."

Sweets nodded as he flexed his hand, the feeling coming back slowly. "I'm a profiler." He tried to size up the man in front of him. "I've worked in the field quite a lot with the Jeffersonian team."

He'd learned with the first agent assigned to the Jeffersonian that a mention of Booth's name only put him on the sidelines. The second agent had refused to entertain any idea of taking him out into the field. The third had wanted results quickly, bemoaned the slowness of working with the lab and had left for greener pastures somewhere in the deserts of Arizona. He, too, had been deaf to any suggestions of field work.

"Good," McCabe grunted. "You're with me."

oOo

He hadn't been in one of the standard-issue black SUVs for some time, hadn't been involved at the heart of an investigation. When McCabe handed him the case file, he almost expected the man to pull it away with a laugh as if this was all some huge prank meant to whet his appetite but leave him feeling empty.

"Seventeen-year-old kid is killed and dumped at St. Gabriel the Archangel Church. Part of the Historic Register." McCabe slowed the vehicle before making a sharp left turn before accelerating with traffic. "We know it's a body dump because. . . ."

"Little blood on the scene, particulates suggest a different location." Sweets finished the man's sentence as he read the file, but he knew how things went. "Bugs could suggest someplace else."

McCabe grunted, then played his fingers against the steering wheel. "That woman who runs the Jeff lab, that doctor. . . ."

"Dr. Saroyan."

Another grunt. "Said you could read people well. Could be a real asset." He turned to Sweets. "Just don't be a smart ass."

"No, sir," Sweets responded.

That earned him another sidelong glance. "Kid has ties to the Anacondas. Was a runner for them, but mom don't know why anyone would want him dead." He grunted. "Take a dangerous road, you figure to lose a tire now and then."

The man was gruff, but direct, and sure of himself. He'd already interviewed the next-of-kin, a mother too worn down by life to keep her child safe, a brother too young to understand a different life. They were headed to the heart of Anaconda territory.

"I've worked at a outreach center for families like this one," Sweets offered. "I worked with Agent Booth on another gang case. I could take lead on this."

This grunt was more of a growl, coming from deep in the man's throat. "We're talking to these Anacondas on their own turf," McCabe said. "My guess is that they'll take point."

oOo

They stopped at a 7-11 some distance from the neighborhood and McCabe shut off the engine and turned to him. "What's your read on the murder?"

He'd given him enough time to read through the file and make an assessment. "I don't think it was premeditated," he started, watching McCabe's face. "The cause of death was a single blow on the side of the head. Maybe it was a moment of rage with whatever was handy."

"Those Jeffersonian people don't have a weapon yet, so I'll give you that." McCabe tapped the steering wheel with his left hand. "So we have a crime of passion or a minute of rage. What's the read on the church thing?"

Of that, Sweets felt more sure. "Guilt. Regret. The person who placed his body at that church with a cross in his hands had a personal relationship with him. They cared about him."

"Family?"

"That would be my guess. Or someone who was like family."

"Had to know the body wouldn't be found right away." The words were a small earthquake coming from McCabe. "Leaky roof, scavengers. Kid was there for a week."

"But the guilt would still be eating at the killer."

McCabe pursed his lips and practically did an entire exercise routine with them before he made his decision. "You know people, Dr. Sweets. We'll go with it."

"So we start with the girlfriend and then onto family members."

"For starters," McCabe said, stretching out the words as he started the vehicle, "Mateo's got an uncle. Rodrigo Esteban. He might know something."

Sweets checked the file and found the notation from the gang unit. "He's recently out of prison for drugs, armed robbery, extortion." The note seemed to go on forever.

"Nice uncle."

oOo

The bodega had a richness of scents that belied the scarcity of items on the shelves. Here the shelves seemed more like a gap-toothed version of his own neighborhood store, orphaned cans of food sharing space with other orphans—boxes of toothpicks, rolls of toilet paper, a bottle or two of oil. Only the cigarettes and the liquor behind the counter seemed fully stocked.

The old man sitting at the counter looked up through a cloud of smoke and eyed them suspiciously. Sweets caught the snakehead peeking out of the man's shirt sleeve and the scarred knuckles that sported prison tats.

McCabe made the introductions with his badge held high the whole time. The FBI jacket alone announced who they were, but McCabe held up his badge and repeated the introductions in Spanish.

"We found the body of your nephew, Mateo Baxa." McCabe repeated the words in rapid-fire Spanish.

The uncle replied in Spanish, slower, more deliberate. Sweets caught the message even if he couldn't make out each word.

"Está muerto. Eso es todo lo que hay. No sé nada acerca de su muerte. Todo lo que sé es que se haya ido."

McCabe asked a couple more questions eliciting answers as sparse as the items on the shelves before he thanked the man and ushered Sweets from the shop. The old man simply continued to sit there, a haze of smoke surrounding his head.

oOo

It took only a few blocks for Sweets to erupt.

"It might have helped to tell him about the circumstances of Mateo's death," Sweets complained. He closed the folder on his lap and glared out the window. The morning rain had left the air heavy with potential for more showers later that afternoon. But for now the skies were relatively clear. Much clearer than he felt. "You didn't need me in there."

McCabe's reply was slow and deliberate. "He never asked about how the kid died."

To be honest, he hadn't caught that and he should have.

"He said, '_He's dead. That's all there is. I know nothing about his death. All I know is he's gone_.'" McCabe eased the vehicle to a stop at the light. "Rodrigo Esteban's old school Anaconda. I can't believe prison drained the fight out of the guy."

"So Esteban knows how Mateo died." Sweets was beginning to see the possibilities. "Normally, he'd ask. Didn't see him as missing. Because he knew he was dead. Doesn't say anything about the kind of person Mateo was. Doesn't say anything about him, just that he's gone."

"Which tells you what?"

Sweets snapped off an answer. "He was disappointed in Mateo. He wrote off his nephew." He was beginning to break off the rust. "Mother says Mateo was secretive. The girlfriend says he was respectful."

"Seventeen-year-old boys want to screw like rabbits every chance they get." McCabe grunted. "Especially a hot mami like that girlfriend of his."

It was crude but accurate. Mateo's sexual interests might have been for someone of his own sex, but culture forced him to have a girlfriend for show.

"Uncle's old school. Believes the only relationships are hetero unless you're locked away. Mateo breaks the unwritten code, the code of machismo, and Estaban disowns him." He corrected himself. "Killed him is more likely."

"So you think uncle dearest killed him, had a change of heart and propped up his dead nephew at the church?" McCabe scanned the traffic like a hawk looking for a break to make a left turn.

"How macho is it to leave a body at a church in the pew with a cross in hand?"

McCabe grunted as he twisted the steering wheel into the turn. "You don't think the uncle had remorse?"

"No." Sweets saw the whole scenario falling into place. "I think someone else took the body to the church and put the cross in his hand."

oOo

He'd missed this. Puzzling through a case, tossing theories back and forth. Talking to the victims' family and friends and co-workers and putting together bits of evidence to make the big picture. This case was a **rebirth** of sorts and he wanted to thank McCabe for the faith in his abilities.

But something else tugged at him, made him wonder if maybe he should be more loyal to Booth who had first trusted his abilities. Plus he didn't know McCabe well, The man just might last as long as the other agents who had been one-hit wonders in Major Crimes.

"You're quiet, there, Doc." McCabe eased the SUV into the parking lot of their next stop, a pool hall spread out in an old dime store. He speared a parking spot and shut off the engine. "Second thoughts on seeing this Enrique Manzibal?"

He shook his head. "No." He felt sure of this even if he wasn't sure about the other thing. He opened his door. "He was close to Mateo and has ties to . . . ."

Whatever his words, they became lost in the loud report of gunfire coming from the building. Sweets followed his first instinct and he crouched behind the door of the truck, his gun ready. For a big man, McCabe was already out of the truck, his gun pointed skyward as he sidled to the building. He made a motion to Sweets to remain at the truck, to stay down, when the door of the hall exploded open and the old man of the bodega hobbled out, blood staining his shirt, a gun waving in the air. McCabe trained his gun on Esteban, barking at him to drop the weapon. For the briefest of moments, Esteban's hand dropped and the gun pointed in the direction of the SUV, but whoever had shot him had had good enough aim, and the old man collapsed in front of the pool hall, the gun in his hand useless.

oOo

Booth had once told him, one death often begat another. The scene in and around the pool hall only confirmed that. Mateo's death had begat Esteban's and quite possibly Enrique Manzibal's. The young man had been rushed to the hospital, but not before telling them that Esteban had killed Mateo for being gay and then had gone after him for taking the body to the church.

"A different kind of love triangle, eh, Doc?"

McCabe handed him a coffee and Sweets took it gratefully. "Any word from the hospital?"

The big man shook his head. In front of them the paramedics were zipping Esteban's body into a bag and loading it onto a stretcher cart. "Kid took two bullets before shooting back." He sipped at his coffee. "Witnesses say that Esteban came in looking for Enrique. _El joto_."

Sweets didn't need a translation to understand the insult.

"You're good, Doc. Smart."

"Not smart enough to get here before Esteban."

McCabe did the mouth calisthenics again, in and out, in and out before leaning in. "You're smart, but kind of dumb." His voice was low and gravelly. "I'd avoid discussing conspiracy theories with your friend in public places, Doc."

"It just isn't healthy."


	25. Breaking Away

**Breaking Away**

_**Author's note:**__ Let me take this opportunity to do a bit of my own_ _**breaking away **__from form._

oOo

The nights here were darker than any he had known in recent memory, the days cast in shadows from the light in the passageway between cells.

This was the oldest part of the jail, the names of prisoners scraped into the walls marking hundreds of occupants over the years. If Bones were here with her magic light she'd probably give him a run-down of the other things covering the walls.

Bones.

She had to be upset to have her phone calls turned away, her visit cancelled. He wasn't sure that he would have changed what happened, _could_ have changed what happened, but he sure as hell would have tried to give her fair warning before he'd elbowed his way into ground zero and took down the goons harassing the accountant.

Hell, he wasn't even sure the man was an accountant. The man just looked scared and he hated that the bullies had been out in full force making a bad situation only worse.

He sighed heavily, the sound of his breath dying in the gloom. The up side to all this? _If_ there was an up side, it was that he got 7 days to heal a bit more before being released back in with the mix. Seven days without a target on his back. Seven days to exercise and get back some more of his strength.

Seven days to miss his wife and kids.

Again he sighed.

Somehow he knew Bones was getting the worst of this. She'd done a miraculous job already of getting information to him, making sure he had photos of Christine and Parker and news of progress on his case. But he couldn't be too sure of how much cooperation she was getting beyond that. The lawyer's messages hadn't been too encouraging.

He swallowed the next sigh. It wouldn't do to get lost in self-pity.

Maybe that super-sized brain of hers was thinking of a way to break him out of jail. Something big with helicopters and a shifty accomplice named Squeaky and enough explosives to blow a hole through the walls and the FBI's story on him.

Sitting up from the unforgiving slab that was his bed, he stood and began to stretch his muscles. Temperance Brennan was probably thinking of a far better escape. His only release was an hour in the yard daily and a phone call to his lawyer every other day.

He just hoped that whatever Bones concocted for **breaking away** from this place would set the story straight and help clean up his FBI.

oOo

Through the janitor's closet and down the stairs, he paused a moment to listen before finishing the last leg of the trip, veering right toward the small supply closet. Producing a key, he unlocked the door and stepped inside.

Whatever supplies had once been stored there had long since been removed and all that remained were a few empty wooden crates and a pile of thin cardboard trays holding display lettering. He pulled up one of the crates to sit on, checked his watch and waited.

If there hadn't been a small window just above the wooden shelving, he might have been tempted to leave the door open, or wait outside. But he concentrated on the window, concentrated on the square of sunlight, and tried to tamp down the anxiety.

But true to her word, he didn't have long to wait. Three soft knocks announced her arrival and he opened the door for her.

"You didn't have any trouble, Dr. B?" he asked as he shut the door behind her.

"No." She was dressed in the work shirt and pants of one of the maintenance staff, her hair pulled back to accommodate the ball cap and a pair of glasses perched on the bridge of her nose. "You should tell Angela the ID card worked."

He stole a glance at the window before settling back onto his crate. "I was hoping Sweets would meet us, but he must have had a problem **breaking away**." The psychologist had insisted that they tell Brennan everything, but now that he was facing her alone, he wondered if he could go through with it.

"The next tour group is in ten minutes," she said, checking her watch. "And I need to meet my father and Christine within half an hour." She pulled off the glasses and set them on the table. "He'll worry."

"Yeah, I've got Fisher covering for me in the lab in case Cam or Clark starts looking for me. Ange's dad is in town and she's spending the day with him and Michael Vincent." His best alibi had desperately needed a break from murders and worry. "This is what we've got."

He produced the paper from his shirt pocket and unfolded it on the crate. "Sweets got the names of three people who might have been in McNamara's back pocket. They had access to records and the ability to manipulate evidence or just make it disappear. Ange started looking into. . . ."

But that's as far as he got. Dr. Brennan was pointing to the third name on the list and telling him something he already knew. "He's dead."

"Yeah." Hodgins had witnessed Brennan's mental gymnastics over the years, but she could still surprise him. "Yeah, he is."

"The official cause of death involved injuries consistent with a car accident, but I think that if the case were re-opened, the cause of death would be something different, perhaps injuries from a beating."

Again, she knew far more than he did. "Did Max give you that?"

Now he had her. "My father?"

It wasn't that he didn't think she had a right to know how they came by the information, it was just that he didn't want to add to her burdens. Every day seemed to dawn to some new obstacle, some new problem and she was more than a bit frayed. "Yeah, your dad gave the paper to Sweets." He outlined how Sweets got the paper and the research he'd done, but that crease between her eyebrows seemed a permanent fixture. "The other two names are equally interesting."

He pointed to the top name. "This person's a clerk for the District Court. Worked there for more than 17 years, but disappeared a few weeks ago. She would have had access to all court documents." There was something more he thought she should know. "She accessed the records in the Kessler trial."

"Recently?"

"No. They were paper records that were never converted to digital. Sweets had to dig to get to them."

She had become still as if all her energies were going into understanding how his bits of information fit into the bigger picture.

"This is the most interesting of all." If truth be told, this was the best mystery of the bunch with at least a dozen different scenarios he could sketch out for her. "This person doesn't exist."

_That_ had her attention. "According to the records, this is an FBI tech who works out of the same building as Booth, but he doesn't exist."

"What does that mean?"

"According to Sweets, his name appears on reports and evidence envelopes and, well, everything. But there are no personnel records for him, no Social Security number, no anything." He leaned back on the crate. "He's a ghost."

There was the Brennan look, the slight tilt of her head, the ever-so-minor twitch at the corner of her mouth betraying what he had come to know—_and love_—about working with her. She instantly saw a connection. Knowing her, she'd seen something more.

"We need to know which files this ghost signed off on."

And there it was another one of those obstacles. "Sweets was supposed to check on that." He checked his watch. "He was supposed to be here."

She stood up quickly. "I have to go."

He handed the list to her and she carefully folded it and pocketed it before retrieving the glasses. "Let me go first and make sure the room's clear."

She nodded and he stepped out of the closed-in space, checked that they were alone before giving her the signal and watching as she made her way through the storage chests and toward the stairs up to the main building.

oOo

It hadn't taken him long to figure out the best way of **breaking away** was also the simplest.

He wasn't an acrobat and certainly couldn't break through the window of the condo and slide down the drainpipe. There were no ledges and with at least 20 feet to the ground, he'd probably break a leg or split open his head. Tunneling through to the other condo was taking too long and frankly, the tool he was using—a forgotten butter knife—was proving too flimsy for the task.

Then there was that damned ankle monitor. It hadn't taken him long to figure out that if the marshals could keep tabs on him, so could the people who'd let him be imprisoned all those years. He could remove the bracelet, but that was only half the problem; the alarm box was the other half. When the thing went off, the sound could positively wake the dead.

No.

A thirty-mile trek to the Jeffersonian with the hopes of talking to Temperance Brennan was iffy at best. He didn't doubt he could walk the distance; he just wasn't sure how long he'd be able to evade the marshals looking for him.

No. Attacking the problem head on wasn't going to work.

The rational thing to do was to shorten the distance.

He'd gotten the idea watching one of those insipid daytime dramas. Mostly he was reading, but Marshal Hernandez had had the thing on for background noise and he'd paused in reading to see a woman in nurse's white talking to someone in a hospital bed.

It wasn't rocket science.

When he was a boy he'd wrangled a day off of school by pretending to be sick. Fever, coughing. A sore throat made more red than was entirely possible by a bit of the red food dye his mother reserved for her red velvet cake and Easter eggs.

He doubted the marshals would be so obliging to bring him some red food dye and believe the color was a natural symptom of some horrible disease he'd contracted. No.

Simple was best.

He experimented with a number of things: the morning oatmeal had the right consistency, the addition of milk—buttermilk—would give him the acid he needed. Kids were probably still making those volcanos—vinegar and baking soda and—again with that red food coloring—a bit of red to produce a prodigious lava flow.

Simple.

Tell Hernandez that the refrigerator stinks—_and how could it not with the kinds of leftovers they were stockpiling in there?_—and encourage the purchase of some baking soda. Practice a bit with some oatmeal topped with the buttermilk. His heart might not thank him, but it might work.

No. It _had_ to work.

Make them think he was violently ill, play it up as long as he could and see if it didn't get him a ride straight to the hospital and a little closer to the Jeffersonian and freedom.

He almost had to laugh at the idea. Daytime TV _was_ good for something.


	26. Forever and a day

**Forever and a day**

_**Author's note: **__Please indulge me as I take __**forever and a day**__ to finish this story. (At least I hope not.) _

oOo

Just standing there, her arms folded in front of her, legs slightly splayed apart, shoulders squared, jaw firm, he could swear Christine was there challenging him on one of his schemes.

The slight tilt of her head, the laser stare—that was pure Temperance.

"Honey, I wanted your Dr. Candy to have the information so he could get it to that Dr. Hodgins. The guy who's into conspiracies."

"Sweets, Dad." She wasn't giving him anything. "His name is Dr. Sweets and don't try to distract me from the issue. Do you know anything else that might help Booth?"

"No." As much as he'd like to help Booth, like to help his daughter, he'd been coming up dry, the very thing that had happened to Booth keeping the people he thought could help silent. Even the list of names had taken **forever and a day** to negotiate. "I wish to hell I had something."

"Then who is this man who gave you the names? He might know more."

Of that, he was. . . _uncertain_. Getting the names alone had been like pulling hen's teeth. Getting a read on whether the guy had more, well, that had been difficult. Years of protecting oneself, of protecting a secret, made it all the more easy to hold onto it. As a man of a few secrets himself, he knew how it was.

"Have you had any progress in following up on the names, honey? Maybe that's all we're going to get."

He had been trying, making assurances, calling in favors, working his damndest to get something, _anything,_ that might help the situation.

"Yes."

It was that breathy way she said it that suggested she'd had a peek inside Pandora's box.

"Why didn't you just give me the names?"

That had been a bit more complicated. "I thought that your Dr. Sweets would do some of the heavy lifting to verify that the names were something after all." He had difficulty disappointing his daughter. "I didn't want them to turn out to be nothing and get your hopes up."

Her posture softened. She knew where his heart was even if his head sometimes worked in counterpoint to hers. "I know how disappointed you were when that surveillance tape of the entryway was toast." She'd been on the verge of tumbling down an emotional cliff when the tape had proven to be useless. And for his daughter, that was a pretty steep cliff to fall from. "I didn't want that."

She relaxed a bit more. "The names were helpful, Dad. But they're not enough to get Booth released."

"Maybe you have to crack open this conspiracy before you can get Booth free."

There was that look again—_pure Temperance_. The look she'd give her brother when he didn't quite understand her thinking, the look she'd given him more than once over the last several years when he just wasn't on the same page with her. Part frustration, part annoyance, part. . . well, _part Temperance._

"Honey, I've got a few people I can try talking to again." Coming clean was sometimes his last resort, but under the circumstances, it seemed the only course of action. "If you think that you're closer to finding out who is behind this, then I might be able to persuade them to give me something more." A vain hope, perhaps, but one he was willing to chase if it helped. "But there are no guarantees."

"Maybe if I talked to them. . . maybe, I could. . . ."

"No." One meeting had had him threatened with bodily harm if he pushed. Another had pushed someone deeper underground. "No. They're scared. They've been scared for years and gone off the grid to keep their secrets. I don't think they're going to simply talk to you."

"I could tell them what I know so far, Dad. They might be willing to help if they knew that I had names and. . . ."

"No." This time he gave her a look, a look of more than a little concern. "No. Honey, it would be like throwing gasoline onto a fire. I don't think that's such a good idea."

"So you aren't going to help Booth."

There was that other look, that little girl in need of help look that as the father of that little girl, he was finding he couldn't resist. His daughter could think circles around most people, but every once in a while she could pull out an emotional argument that only melted one's heart.

And scared him to death.

"I'll ask. The one guy I met with at that Aldo's bar." He half-shrugged, half convinced it wouldn't work, half worried it would. "He might want to know what we know about those names."

So she told him what she had already found out. And even though Max Brennan was a tough man, _a hard man_ when he needed to be, he couldn't help but worry that they might just be better off making a run for it.

oOo

The troubling thing was she had given up much too early.

Maybe it was because she was relieved that she could quit halfway through the P's when she had hit the magic number three. Three men who did not have DNA profiles in their personnel records. Three soldiers who killed Foster. Three who tried to kill Booth and met an unmovable—_and thankfully, unkillable_—force.

Three.

"How do I tell Dr. Brennan that I found 5 names?"

"What?"

She'd been wary because of what had happened to Booth. To Brennan. To their life together. She'd been scared that someone might trace the searches back to her despite Angela's assurances, scared that they were poking at a viper's nest. While she didn't have much these days given Haley Kent's betrayal, she'd shied away from doing anything that might make her the next target for fear of losing what little she had. She wasn't proud of her paranoia, but that's in part why it had taken **forever and a day **to find just the three.

But unable to sleep following her conversation with Dr. Brennan, she'd dragged herself from bed, Arastoo in tow, and had finished the search that night, starting from where she had left off and following through all the way to the end of the alphabet."

"Damn." There were no words for this. "Damn."

"This is good." Arastoo wrapped a hand around her forearm and squeezed. "Now you know that you've looked over everything now."

"No," she corrected him. "No I didn't."

She'd already told him about the photo, the photo taken three years ago when her hair was longer, but she hadn't told him about the rest of it. The photo had forced her to revisit the autopsy, to really look carefully at the tox report. She'd even gone so far as to ask Wendell to review the X-rays rather than wait on Dr. Brennan only to have the former intern tell her the bone damage wasn't completely consistent with a head-on collision.

"If this is a car without an airbag, the imprint of the steering wheel on the bones is far too even," he'd told her. "Most steering wheels are tilted. This one isn't." He'd given her that quizzical look, the one that told her he wanted to know more about the case, but that wasn't really his role any longer. "But that only predisposes that there wasn't an airbag. Then the damage would be far different."

"They fooled you, gave you the information they wanted you to have." Arastoo's voice, soothing as it was, couldn't give her the one thing she needed most. "Everyone makes mistakes."

"Not me," she said. "I don't just blindly sign off on an autopsy. I'm very thorough. I just let everything get the better of me." She rubbed at the spot on her forehead that seemed to be the center of a permanent headache. "I was so angry at losing the lab, so angry that everyone had gone off and I wasn't making it on my own that I. . . I even lashed out at Dr. Brennan, blaming her that all of them had taken off."

Arastoo could be very still, but usually his stillness meant he was weighing his thoughts. Now it only seemed as if he were judging her, weighing her guilt for having brought this on.

"Cam," he finally soothed, "you aren't to blame for all this."

"Maybe," she said slowly, "maybe not." But both times she hadn't been thorough. "But I do know something I can do now."

"You'll give Dr. Brennan the names," Arastoo offered. "She'll appreciate that you waded through the rest of the records." 

"Dr. Brennan?"

Even Arastoo couldn't spin that idea. "She appreciates that people look through everything no matter what. That they correct their mistakes." He hadn't completely forgotten how Dr. Brennan worked. "I think she'll need to know that there are others possibly out there."

"Yes," she said, her course of action clear. "And maybe we can make the dead give up a few more secrets."

oOo

_One-two-three-four. Pivot. One-two-three-four. Pivot. One-two. . . ._

The damned cell wa at best, devoid of any personality beyond the names scratched into the walls, and a damned sight too small for proper pacing.

_. . . Three-four. Pivot. One-two-three. . . ._

He was marching in boot camp, exercising his body if not his mind, pushing himself to keep himself in shape.

_. . .Four. Pivot. One-two-three. . . . _

The cadences of his youth repeated themselves in his mind, _"__They say that in the Army the biscuits are mighty fine, one rolled off the table and killed a friend of mine," _as he tried to make this time-out work for him physically and mentally. He switched to the other cadences that marked his time running at home, ones he replayed in his mind as he high stepped it past Mrs. Kowalski's yappy little Maltese and as he rounded the corner of Mr. Bradon's house, or as he pushed past the Jordan's garden. No one could ever call this place home, but he could think of home, dream of home, plan for home.

_Because he was going home_. Bones wasn't going to stop. And when he got out, he wasn't either.

_. . . Four. Pivot. One-two-three-four. Pivot. One. . . ."_

He had thoughts about that. Kessler. Follow up on the McNamaras. Foster. Look into the crap Pelant might have hacked into. Find the contact in the FBI. And that congressman. Damned congressman. He wasn't going to get away with this.

_. . .Two-three-four. Pivot. One-two. . . ."_

And keep his mind sharp. His body ready.

_. . .Three-four. Pivot. One. . . ." _

Because in three days, he'd see Bones again. That alone was enough to live for. It might seem like it would take **forever and a day**, but it was damned worth it to see her, even for a moment, even through that damned glass, but she was worth it. Worth going to hell and back.

_. . .Two-three-four. Pivot. One-two-three-four. Pivot. One. . . . _

**Author's note #2:** I thank everyone for reading and especially to those who have favorited, followed or reviewed the story so far. I hope it isn't disappointing you. It's harder than I thought, trying to keep to the themes and tell the story this way yet keep the movement forward toward something. I hope to get B&B together sooner than later and to unravel some of the mysteries behind the great conspiracy.


	27. Lost and Found

**27. Lost and Found**

"Why did you say that?" 

Days later, after worry had grown into paranoia and had given him world-class bouts of insomnia and indigestion, he was standing in the office staring down at Special Agent McCabe seated behind Booth's old desk and trying to get some relief.

"Why did you say it was unhealthy to discuss conspiracy theories?"

The man leaned back in the chair and gave him one of those looks—the one he wasn't sure of, the one he couldn't quite decipher without second-guessing himself.

"I'd think that as a psychologist, you'd be in agreement that conspiracy theories tend to be in the abnormal range of your profession. A bit paranoid, right?"

He shelved that debate for later. "I just wanted to know what was behind what you said." Sweets tried to stand a bit straighter. "It sounded almost like a threat."

That damned look he was never good at reading gave way to one he could read. It didn't make him feel better.

"A threat?" McCabe did that thing with his lips that reminded Sweets of a fish. "A friendly warning, that's all."

"Who wants to warn me off?"

McCabe slowly leaned in. "I don't blame you, Doc, for being a bit suspicious. From what I understand, this Booth, he was tightly wound."

"Blame me?" He felt this wasn't going anywhere near where he thought the conversation would go. "This is a classic case of deflection," he countered, trying to regain some control. "I simply want to know why you were telling me that discussing conspiracy theories was unhealthy."

The big man leaned back in his chair again. Then a small, almost imperceptible shake of his head.

"How good of a psychologist are you if the man you've been working with has some kind of anger management problem? Or was it impulse control? Or was he just that good at hiding something?" McCabe's voice became hard. "Either way, three good men are dead and your friend's on his way to death row."

"Whatever happened to 'innocent until proven guilty?'" He could see how entrenched the man was in believing the opposite. "What if there really is more to the story?"

McCabe pushed himself up and he leaned over the desk. "Here's where the conspiracy theories get unhealthy. Do you really believe the FBI would arrest someone without the evidence to back it up? Or was there some kind of psychic break bullshit where he thought the boogie men were out to get him? Oh, he was **lost and found** his damned mind again _after_ he mowed down three good agents just doing their job?" He straightened and put some distance between them again. "The guy did it. Believe something else and you won't be working here long. You certainly won't be working with me." McCabe's tone had the hard edge of a knife. "That, good doctor, is why it would be unhealthy to buy into the crap conspiracy theories floating around."

As in many things, there was a choice here—just acquiesce and allow McCabe to believe he supported the FBI's version of the story or stand up to the man and tell him he'd side with Booth. But he didn't react fast enough.

"I've read the files on the Jeffersonian crew. Your Dr. Hodgins is quite the conspiracy nut. He's probably coming up with a black ops theory," McCabe continued. "Government hit squad deep within the FBI. A band of Robin Hoods, no, Shadows or Green Hornets or some such nonsense."

"You're the shrink," he added. "You tell me. That kind of thinking has got to warp someone's mind. We're lucky that man stays in the lab. Don't you think so?"

But as Sweets stood there formulating his response, he couldn't help but think that warped minds came in all sized packages—even a package the size of McCabe.

oOo

"Are you sure, cherie?"

She didn't answer Caroline Julian because, frankly, she'd been asking herself that very question for the last half hour and well before. And while she had an answer, she also didn't have an answer.

They were sitting in the judge's chambers waiting to present their case for exhumation and she still wasn't convinced. Oh, she was convinced that they had a good case for exhumation. Of that she was certain. And she was certain that she didn't much care her reputation would take a hit on this one; she almost felt she deserved to. Of course, it hadn't been the first time a coroner had made a wrong conclusion and been corrected by the Jeffersonian team—_or was it being been schooled by Dr. Temperance Brennan?_—and if she had anything to do about it, it wouldn't be the last. Even if she were fixing her own mistake.

Her conscience just wouldn't let this rest, another certainty. And she was angry that someone had played her when she was vulnerable. Another check mark next to certain on that one as well.

The uncertainty centered on what the body could tell them that might actually help free Booth. She just wasn't sure of that at all.

"Miss Julian, it's good to see you. And you? Dr. Saroyan, is it?"

She'd been so lost in her thoughts that she barely caught the judge's entrance, different from so many others as the man wheeled himself in, his clerk following close behind. When he reached the desk, he handed the clerk some folders and waited as the clerk made his exit.

"Judge Latrell?" Miss Julian started just as the judge finished adjusting his position behind his desk. "We're here on the exhumation order for. . . ."

He waved her off. "I've read the papers, Miss Julian. I understand that the request is being made by the original coroner in the case who believes that she was provided incorrect information that resulted in a finding of accidental death in the original. This new information?"

She caught the question in his inflection and explained what had happened when she first got the case. "But when Dr. Brennan suggested that. . . ."

Judge Hank Latrell brightened. "Temperance Brennan? Dr. Temperance Brennan?" He shifted forward. "How did it come to light that the first finding might be in error?"

This was the part that was tricky to navigate. Luckily, for her her, Caroline dove in. "Dr. Brennan seems to have some time on her hand these days and just loves diving back into the **lost and found** box and finding someone just didn't pick up that lone detail in the bottom and through jimjams and flipflaps and other anthropological gymnastics points to murder."

The judge almost smiled. "Miss Julian, it is always a pleasure to listen to your explanations, but I need something more cogent."

This time Cam took the thread. "Dr. Brennan was tipped that the case might not be as cut-and-dried as originally thought. I had her re-examine the X-rays and she determined that the injuries were not from the steering wheel as I was told by the first forensic anthropologist on the case."

The judge had been following along by re-reading the papers on his desk. "Why isn't the original bone guy here?"

"He's off in the Middle East somewhere picking through some archaeological site."

Latrell smiled. "Probably flew out there the moment he realized he'd be facing the wrath of Miss Julian for screwing up this one." His eyes darted between the two of them on the opposite side of his desk. "I also read that a Dr. Clark Edison concurs with Dr. Brennan that the injuries indicate injuries that are not consistent with a car accident. You indicate this is most likely murder disguised as a car accident." He shifted. "It's a pretty elaborate cover-up." He scanned the papers again. "You note that the X-rays were examined by an intern who also indicated that the injuries were more than likely not caused by impact with a steering wheel." 

"The intern was trained by Dr. Brennan."

Latrell gave a low whistle. "So, if I'm reading between the lines correctly, you believe the bone guy on this to be incompetent or compromised." But he waved off Miss Julian who was winding up to respond. "I don't take an exhumation like this lightly. The family should have some sense of closure. But this is fairly clear to me that something isn't quite right." He pulled a pen from his desk and uncapped it. "You don't have a suspect in mind for engineering this?"

Caroline shook her head. "No, your honor. But we'll look into that weaselly rat bone doctor first."

"I don't buy into conspiracy theories, generally, but I do believe that based on the evidence you've presented, that an exhumation is warranted." He signed the order then looked up, eyeing them both again. "Off the record, I hope you find out the bone doctor on this one is just a quack and that he'd better off out of the country. On the record. . . ," he paused and then waved himself off. "I think I'll save that for later, after you've been through the evidence again." He checked his watch. "I've got court."

Miss Julian began to rise, and Cam followed suit, but they were both stopped as the judge made one final comment.

"I'd like to think that finding the truth means that someone's life is changed for the better. But clearly here, the truth was hidden for a reason and bringing it to light is better than keeping it in the shadows."

Cam wanted to reply, but the uncertainty of what lay hidden in the shadows frightened her.

oOo

She awoke to the cries of a distant voice, but found only Christine sleeping next to her, the tiny body splayed across her own. For several minutes she lay there, breathing heavily as the adrenaline forged by her subconscious receded.

But the memories remained.

Slowly, she unwrapped her daughter from her own body, sliding out from beneath her, leaving the child in the large bed alone as she made her way toward the kitchen of her father's condo.

The rain that had threatened all day had drenched the night and she could hear the distant grumblings of thunder to accompany the steady beat on the window. Leaving the lights off, she let the stray light from the street guide her way to the sink where she filled a glass with water and then headed to the table.

The dreams did more than interrupt her sleep; they seemed to taunt her, even though she knew that was not rational. For weeks she had dug through old cases, followed new leads, but nothing seemed to provide her the right evidence to help Booth.

She hadn't given up. But for each thing once **lost and found **anew, she'd only found a new strand of evidence leading toward other people and away from Booth.

"The thunder wake you?"

Max had an unnerving way of finding her these nights when sleep slipped away. "I had a bad dream."

He slipped into the seat across from her. Her father could also say nothing and yet, say a great deal in silence. "I'm fine, Dad. I just miss Booth."

Just how much couldn't be quantifiably measured, but she felt his absence in almost every aspect of her day. And without him working beside her, guiding the investigation, she felt that despite her accomplishments as a forensic anthropologist, she had only part of the answers.

"My guy might give me more information," Max was saying, "but he's hard to convince. He doesn't feel safe."

The three names he provided had already uncovered stains marring the FBI: a court clerk who regularly controlled cases seen by judges, a reporter who had been killed after reporting about the finances of McNamara's companies, a FBI tech who just didn't exist and yet apparently signed off on evidence.

Usually she was good at puzzles, her mind constantly fitting the pieces together to create the larger image. But these pieces all seemed to have been cut for different pictures and the key parts all seemed to have been far flung like might be done by one of those poorly behaved children in Christine's new day care.

"You should go back to bed, honey," Max offered. "Christine will be up at the crack of dawn."

She knew it was hyperbole, but she nodded in agreement, yet couldn't find the energy to stand and make the walk back to the bedroom. "I'll get my computer and work in a little bit."

This time her father nodded and stood, bending to kiss her as he made his way back to bed.

For several moments she sat there wondering how it was that her life had grown so quiet that she could almost hear Booth's voice in her head urging her to do something.

But she didn't know what else to do.


	28. Light

**Light**

"Damn!"

He'd seen some pretty amazing things in the lab over the years, the brilliant leaps and bounds of the two resident geniuses, Dr. Hodgins and Dr. Brennan, but these bones only reminded him of just how truly amazing his former mentor could be.

"She called it. Down to the diameter of the stool's seat." He straightened and moved the Mideo camera into position and peered up at the monitor. "The weapon was a stool. The assailant turned the stool upside down on the victim and sat on it, leaned into it, what-have-you, and crushed the ribs of our newspaper reporter."

"That's truly a horrible way to go," Fisher offered. "And what's worst, or better depending on your point of view, we've got a second DNA that might tell us which rat bastard killed this person."

"That's something Dr. Brennan didn't get from the X-rays," Wendell Bray added. "Granted, it's about the only thing."

He wasn't used to having an audience like this one, but he was certainly glad for the company as he found Dr. Brennan's notes to be an uncanny run-down of what this poor victim had gone through. Torture. Defensive wounds. "She's even got the weight of the assailant down to within a kilogram."

He couldn't do it, not just from the X-rays, but he was glad that she could. It made him think she was still part of the investigative team.

"I just stopped by looking for Dr. Saroyan," Wendell went on. "She's upstairs in the lounge area having a pretty intense conversation with Miss Julian and Dr. Sweets." He checked his watch. "I've got a doctor's appointment."

Wendell looked pale and thin, but he was putting in a full day every day and despite the cancer and medical treatment, appeared to be doing fairly well. And he was keeping an eye on the goings-on in the lab. He had an uncanny knack for coming into the bone room when there was an interesting case or finding his way into Dr. Hodgins' Ookey Room when the mad scientist there was embroiled in one of his experiments.

"They're probably trying to figure out what we've got so far," Fisher offered. He studied the tall intern with as much of an objective eye as possible. Despite the fact that Fisher reminded him of Eeyore or Igor—he wasn't exactly sure—he had a pretty good feel for what was going on around them in the lab these days.

Wendell gave him a look. "You think this case might help Booth?"

Frankly, he didn't know what to think. Dr. Saroyan had surprised him with an old case like this one, a case she'd actually been the coroner on. Even handed him hand-written notes from Dr. Brennan. "A major 'do-over'," Fisher had quipped at the time.

_A major pain the ass,_ he had thought when the body had first been brought in. He hadn't looked forward to working with the newest FBI guy, but for some reason, he was remarkably absent from the lab and from Dr. Saroyan's conversation. Whenever there was a new development in the case, she hadn't gone to phone Special Agent McCabe; instead, she'd made the call to Dr. Sweets or to Miss Julian.

And here was Wendell asking a question that somehow seemed to be lurking in the shadows of the lab these past few months. A question that badly needed an answer.  
Given the evidence, he didn't know what to make of it. The last time there had been such whispering in the lab, Dr. Saroyan has whisked him out of the lab and someone had snuck in a blonde Dr. Brennan fresh from her time on the lam to examine bones and shed her own kind of **light** on the investigation.

"It would be nice if this were something that could help Booth," Wendell repeated.

_Yes_, he thought to himself. But false hope was about as bad as no hope. And while a positive attitude was important—_look at Wendell and his cancer treatment and just anyone dealing with a catastrophic illness_—they really didn't have the luxury of letting their hopes get the better of them.

No.

"I'll let Dr. Saroyan know that you've been looking for her when she comes down," he said to Wendell, trying to get that just-right tone of efficiency and authority without being too dismissive. He turned. "Mr. Fisher? We need to go over the bones again and make sure that we have everything. We don't really have time to speculate."

oOo

He liked when the puzzle pieces fit in neatly. Working in smalls—slivers, shards, residues, scrapings, flakes, chunks, crumbs, dollops, smidgens, snips, pinches, grains, mites, dabs, whispers, dashes, whits, driblets, chips—he could create from an iota a bigger picture of a piece of cloth that covered a victim, a tidbit to indicate where they'd been, a scintilla of a weapon to dispatch them.

Take the small picture to make the big picture; that's what he did. And he did it well.

Take these particulates scraped from beneath the fingernails of the latest victim who had already been buried. Of course, there are the contextual clues. What particulates are consistent with being prepared for burial? Embalming? The casket? The ground? Were there any factors that compromised the integrity of the casket? Take the particulate, factor in the constants and shake it all out and look at what remains. Rearrange, reassemble, review and see how they create the small pictures that make up the bigger picture.

But that didn't mean he had to like the big picture.

He hadn't liked the big picture since Booth had been arrested and Dr. B had been dismissed. Hadn't liked it at all.

On one hand he had a wife who was worrying herself sick over her friend while driving herself to exhaustion trying to help. Both Booth and Dr. B deserved better. Period.

Then there was the sense of betrayal. _The Boss_ didn't need to acquiesce to the short-sighted, bottom-line-minded automatons on the Jeffersonian board who gave into the FBI's request to let one of their best scientists go. _The Boss_ was just that these last few months.

He was expecting his own marching orders any time now because of the big picture.

Obviously they'd gotten rid of Dr. B because she wasn't going to kowtow to the FBI or anyone who would lock up Booth on the pretext that he'd actually killed 3 fellow agents. That was absurd. They hadn't really stopped Brennan from delving into the information hidden on the nipple ring microchip and they sure as hell hadn't shut down the evidence gathering at his end of the Jeffersonian. Both he and Angie were FBI-enemies No. 1, if they'd only open their eyes and realize that he already had an idea of what they were hiding in the mighty Hoover.

He knew.

Government conspiracies meant to hide the real truth from the people. Politicians greedy for money and power and unwilling to take no for an answer. A black ops arm of the FBI sent out to quell any opposition.

He was right about the last one, wasn't he? Wasn't that how Booth had been snatched up and swept away to jail?

And then that not-so-secret cabal upstairs in the lounge area. Sweets, Miss Julian, Cam—this case had too many loose ends for that to be a social gathering.

"The meeting's still going on," Angela announced as she entered his room. "Twenty-three minutes and change." She looked put out. "The reporter was a health and wellness reporter at the _Reader_ at the time of his death. You think this case is related?"

_That_ was the big question of the day. _If_—and it was a pretty big if—the case of the exhumed reporter not-so-accidentally killed was connected in some way to Foster's death or to the McNamara's, would that mean they'd have something to free Booth? Or bring back Brennan?

"I wouldn't get your hopes up, Ange," he said, his voice as soothing as he could make it. He had had far too much practice of late with that particular skill. "It could just as well mean that Cam's trying to do damage control."

Angie had that lost puppy dog look—the one that crossed her face each time she thought of Brennan or Booth or the state of things in the lab. He stood and crossed past his desk and took her hands in his. "We're still working through the information on the chip. It's just going to take some time."

He pulled her into his arms and felt the tension in her body. It would be another night of restlessness and staring at a canvas as she tried to paint her way out of this funk.

"When Brennan and Booth were together, there was this **light**? You know?" Angie's face was burrowed in his shoulder and translating what she was saying lagged behind her for a second. "But she's so discouraged, Jack."

He'd seen it, too. The old Brennan determination had never faltered, but he could see the cracks in the veneer, the despair bleeding through.

Maybe it was a moment spent thinking about something other than the case. Maybe it was his brain working overtime trying to ease his wife's pain. Maybe it was just that time he was preaching about easing the elements together, but something clicked in the puzzle.

"Oh, my God," he said as he pulled away from her. "I think I figured out something." He began to pull her out of the room. "We need to access a couple of databases on your computer. I think I found a connection."

oOo

She hated this.

Years of working cases, years of sifting through evidence, years of a close relationship with the FBI and they had nothing.

Nothing.

Sweets was pacing, his nervous energy fueling her own sense of being backed in a corner. Miss Julian only sat with a scowl on her face giving any indication of where her mind was.

They'd been sitting up in the lounge area of the Medico Legal Lab and trying to figure out their next step and making little if any progress. Below them, the lab continued on, collecting and calculating, testing and trying, while three highly intelligent people above them were just plain stuck.

Sighing, she looked up at the skylight, the afternoon sky grey and threatening a storm. It mirrored her mood.

"The powers that be don't want us going in with guns blazing unless we've got the firepower to back up our accusations." Miss Julian broke through the silent deadlock. "Personally, I was considering a career change. I can practice right now, 'paper or plastic?'"

Sweets finally stopped his circular track and wilted into the chair, shaking his head. "I just don't think we've got anything that ties this back to Foster or the McNamaras."

She threw up her hands. "We have to take this to the FBI."

She got a resounding, "No" from Sweets and another scowl from Miss Julian.

"Isn't there someone in the FBI who we can take this to?"

It wasn't like they had much to take. A dead reporter who had been tortured, thrown into a car and pushed off an embankment to obscure the injuries. Whoever had done it had done a fine job, subverting the tests, compromising the forensic anthropologist and making her look like a damned fool. They had a stool as a murder weapon, a DNA test that proved who the murderer was even though the person wasn't in any of their databases, and enough of the flesh left to do a proper tox screen.

And a lingering feeling that this was somehow related to Foster or McNamara.

"Perotta?"

Sweets shook his head. "Maternity leave."

"Charlie Burns?"

"California."

"Shaw?"

"Special assignment."

"Sparling?"

Sweets looked like he swallowed his tongue. He shook his head.

"Hacker?"

Sweets leaned back in the chair, his back to the seat and his face pointing upward. "Private consultancy. Making more money than God."

"Cullen?"

"Retired." Caroline's voice had that tired edge of a woman who had had one too many trips through the same drive-through. "Going through the list again just isn't going to make the man _un-retire_."

"Then we should take this to McCabe."

She'd said that before, said it again and would continue to say it until Sweets voiced his objection. She had little faith in the other agents they'd worked with in Booth's absence, but McCabe appeared to be sticking and she wanted to believe that someone in the bureau could be trusted.

"He's worked on the West Coast and in Alaska for the last dozen years." She was feeling exasperated just as the skies opened up and rain began to fall on the panes of glass above them. The effect had given the lounge a gloominess that even the two floor lamps couldn't break through. "Of all the agents we've worked with lately, he seems to have a better handle on everything. He doesn't have the same ties the other agents had to the D.C. area and he might very well be untouched by all this."

She wasn't sure what _all this_ was, but she sure as hell was tired of how _all this_ was coloring her life. Two people she respected—_and loved_—were downstairs and angry with her still for dismissing Brennan not to mention the interns who alternated between respect, admiration and fear of their former mentor. And love. And then there was Brennan and Booth and. . . she was sick of it all. But Sweets was resisting and she had to respect his opinion even if it just made things harder.

"The man practically threatened me about talking to Hodgins. He believes that Booth is an infection in the bureau and needs to be cut out from the herd and left to fester and die in prison."

Caroline groaned. "He must really have you rattled to get you to mix metaphors like a margarita." She raised a brow in his direction. "You sitting like that is giving me a backache."

He pushed himself up and settled back into the chair with a small protest from the cushion.

"If Sweets says we need to be cautious with this cowboy from the West, then I'm going to have to agree with him. It's not going to help Booth to take this to the sheriff only to find out he was really Jesse James."

"Well, a number of sheriffs in the old West. . . ."

She held up her hand to Sweets and gave him the eye. "We're going to take this to the director himself if need be, but not until we have something more concrete." Caroline stood up. "Sorry, cherie," she said, "but I have to side with our shrinky-dink here." She gave a look toward the stairs and then back toward them. "I want to give them something so big that they can't ignore it, but right now we've got a dead body that _might_ be connected. Problem is that we've got a good man who needs a lifeline right now and the best we can throw his way is a spool of thread."

She closed her eyes and felt the first rumble of thunder shake the glass above her. They needed someone like Booth to save Booth. Could she open her eyes and have all this madness just go away?

Opening her eyes, she saw that Caroline's focus was at the end of the gangway and the man half-running, half-walking toward them.

He was almost beaming.

"Dr. Hodgins?"

The man practically vibrated. "Angela has found a connection between our dead reporter and Classico Pharmaceuticals."

"So?"

"We need Dr. Brennan." Hodgins had that look of excitement, but he was talking in a hushed tone. Even Sweets stood to hear him better. "She talked to Dr. Olms about a drug that was developed by Vivelux Pharmaceuticals but was sold to Classico Pharmaceuticals for an undisclosed sum. My guess is that sum was no where near the real value of. . . ."

"Could we just rewind this?" Caroline was taking charge. "You've got pharmaceuticals, Dr. Brennan and money changing hands, but what does that have to do with the poor body downstairs on Dr. Edison's **light** table?"

Hodgins took a deep breath. "I don't know if this is enough to free Booth, but it's part of the tangled web that put him in jail."


	29. Dark

**Dark**

_**Author's Note: SPOILERS BELOW! You have been warned. **_

oOo

The first blow came at the urinal just as he was tucking himself in, the force sending him careening toward the wall. The second blow came as he tried to steady himself against the wall so he could turn toward his attacker. But he didn't get the chance as unforgiving arms locked his own into place. Blows seared into his ribs from the left, then the right, before a final blow made him sink to one knee. A blink and the **dark** frightened him so much that he forced his eyes open to see his attackers.

The Latinos had enlisted some help for his return to general population.

"You're loco if you think I forget," the one said. "Federales scum." The goons behind him let him go and he slumped into the wall, only falling to the floor when their footsteps had finally receded.

oOo

"You first. Don't keep us in the **dark**."

She'd spent so many weeks disliking Cam that her administrative stance—ramrod straight with crossed arms and that look—just couldn't spur her into action. But a nod from Hodgins did and she brought her computer monitor to life.

"We shared with Brennan the information that was on the nipple ring," she said as a slew of images littered her screen. "She has all this."

"I'm not hearing any of this," Caroline said. "Until I need to."

She gave a look to Sweets who was practicing his own administrative posture. "I'm sure seeing any of this is unhealthy for all of us."

A frisson of tension seemed to hit the room, but she ignored it. "We looked into each one of the files, but they appear to be random acts of potential blackmail." The images were so familiar that she didn't bother to narrate them for the others. But Hodgins did pick up the thread.

"Brennan saw this image," he said as she brought up Olms' photo. "She made the connection between Olms and cystic fibrosis. He's a leading researcher in the field and she knows his work."

"Because of her niece." Sweets still hadn't relaxed his posture. "She has cystic fibrosis and Dr. Brennan being Dr. Brennan. . . ."

There were silent acknowledgements all around.

"But here's the thing," Hodgins continued. "Olms created a promising drug therapy for cystic fibrosis, the key component being an enzyme that works at helping to clear the mucus from the lungs."

"Fibrillapro," Cam offered. "At least that's the brand name." 

"Right," Jack continued. He was enjoying his moment. "The enzyme treatment has applications in other diseases as well including black lung, mesothelioma. Viveluxe Pharmaceuticals stood to make gazillions on the treatment."

"Fibrilla is a Classico drug," Cam countered. "It's one of their star drug therapies."

"But Olms works for Vivelux." Hodgins was waiting for someone to figure out the significance of the information. The pause became a bit uncomfortable.

"And why would Olms create a drug for Classico and not for his own company?"

Cam's question was just the right treatment for Hodgins. "Brennan found out he was blackmailed into turning over his therapy to Classico. She talked to Olms, even has it all on tape."

"Our doctor there did something that should have been the end of his medical career," Caroline guessed. "But he was much too valuable for them to shut down."

"Exactly." Hodgins stepped toward the screen and pointed at the Vivelux logo. "So far to date, Brennan found three other drug therapies that were turned over to Classico." He paused, then hit the bottom line. "Classico's profits have grown over 1200% in the last 10 years just from those drugs alone."

"Okay," Sweets said, his body uncoiling as he pointed toward monitor. "Why not have Olms come and work for your company instead of cherry picking their best drugs?"

"They absorb all the costs." Cam seemed mesmerized by the picture of Olms. "It takes years for a drug to make it to market. But they've bypassed the process and take the best of the lot."

"Plus they can hold his sins over his head and if they were to be found out. . . ." Caroline offered before Sweets finished the thought.

"They don't absorb the risk." The shrink shook his head. "Olms must have done something pretty horrible for them to have that kind of control over him."

"Yeah," Hodgins said. "He tried to help his own kid."

oOo

The second blow wasn't physical, not really, but it was a kick to his head and heart. The guards told him he wouldn't receive or be able to make phone calls for another week because he started the fight in the cafeteria. And no visitors.

No contact with the outside world except for his lawyer. And that request was to be made through a guard who'd get to it when he got to it.

oOo

"_Yeah," Hodgins said. "He tried to help his own kid."_

Even though she had known the story, Hodgins words touched her heart, made her instantly think of their son and what either one of them might do for him. "Dr. Olms told Brennan everything but we didn't know how it fit in."

"Until now," said Cam.

"Yes," she agreed, "until now. Brennan's the one who's been working on this full time."

Caroline pursed her lips and while she hoped the prosecutor would pronounce the death knell for Brennan's absence from the lab, the woman took a different route. "Why is Dr. Olms being so generous with his information?"

Hodgins supplied the answer. "According to Brennan, the man feels he had nothing to lose."

"And as Booth's reminded us several times, a man with nothing to lose is a very dangerous man."

oOo

The third blow came in the cafeteria, the scene of the initial blow-up. He was waiting in line and shuffling forward toward the food and past a guard when someone from behind hit him. The blow, delivered to his lower back sent him pitching forward with a lightning bolt of pain through his kidneys. The inmate in front of him pushed back and within seconds another rain of blows sent him to his knees. While the pain seared his body, the image of a guard staring impassively at him as he crumpled to the floor was seared into his brain.

**Author's second note of no real importance: **_Yes, I paid far too much attention to Comic Con interviews. It always becomes a conundrum and I have to convince myself that I don't have to match up my story to TPTB's version because I'm not a mind-reader and they have the advantage of having a team of writers. It sometimes takes a while for that to sink in. But when they give you a few tidbits, it doesn't seem right to just let them sit there and do nothing, so. . . ._


	30. Faith

**Faith**

_Roads here curl and twist, pushing up higher into the foothills then falling back toward lazy little shacks and rusting trailers then winding around stands of trees before dipping into another turn that rolls through another little tired town left behind the times and marked by a faded sign. _

"He's off the grid, honey, so don't expect much."

All right, so it hadn't been much of an invitation to tag along, but she would have spent the day deep in research to mask her worry, so breaking the rules had just seemed right. He'd followed all the other instructions, a pre-1990 vehicle to ensure no GPS devices, the map, scheduled stops, cases of Cold Trail Ale—_he had at first thought that to be a joke_—canned food and 50 gallons of gasoline, another 50 of kerosene.

Maybe this was just a wild goose chase. Hadn't the guy given him a map from the turn-of-the-century—_and not the most recent one_—with colorful place names on it like "Romantic Mapledale" and "Burnt Cabin Woods?" Maybe this was just another fool's errand in a summer that seemed so full of them. That's why he hadn't really told her much about the guy, just that he needed to bring him some things and he was out somewhere in the middle of a ghost town within a ghost town.

She'd been quiet for the last twenty miles or so, the questions she'd peppered him with at the start of their journey petering out miles ago. His daughter was always so full of questions, her mind quick and curious. Even as a little girl she had that hungry mind that almost constantly needed to be satiated. Then she would go quiet—not to rest that mind of hers, he didn't think that was possible—but to let all the pieces fall into place and build up another set of questions that needed answering.

He had questions, too, questions that he had kept to himself for fear of asking them and of her losing that brittle self-control she had maintained so far. Why hadn't they allowed her to talk to Booth? To see him?

No, maybe the real reason he hadn't poked too deeply at those embers was that he knew the answer. They were trying to break Booth, or kill him, anything to make him go away.

And she probably suspected as much.

So he broke the silence. "How many more miles before we make the turn?"

There was that moment's hesitation as if he had interrupted her thoughts, then the quick glance at the odometer. "Another 4.7 miles. But the directions or the odometer are off."

The truck eased into the turn which seemed to push him a little too hard into the door for a bit too long before easing into another twisting trail taking them to a lower elevation.

"Close enough will have to do," he murmured. "He's traveled this road a hundred times, so it's probably this old truck."

Russ had come up with the old truck, driving up from Florida where he and Amy and the girls now resided. Despite its vintage, the truck held up well against the spaghetti-like roads.

"Russ wouldn't have a truck with a faulty odometer."

That pronouncement, of almost blind **faith** in her brother, touched him in the same way that any hint of affection from his daughter did. Tenderness in his daughter could be especially hard-won, especially for her brother and father.

"We don't know how long he's had the truck, honey."

That seemed to satisfy her as they made another hairpin turn that should take them to a short stretch of straight road—_was there such a thing in West Virginia?_—and a final turn to take them to their destination.

He'd been working on the man for weeks now, and while bringing along Tempe might sour their agreement, he had had enough experience to know that the man might never give up his secrets so even a trip alone might be a wasted effort. He doubted the bags of organic fruits and vegetables his daughter had insisted upon with the beer and fuel had any bargaining power.

"Slippery Creek Road." It was one of the rarest of rarities out here—a street sign. But the milestone meant they were getting closer.

"When we get there, I should do all the talking, Temperance." He used her full name for emphasis. "He's kind of prickly." So prickly he hadn't even told Temp anything about him except that he might have some information. She'd asked a few questions about him, about the nature of the information, but surprisingly she had given up that line of inquiry and had focused on their connection and the need for secrecy.

When she said nothing in argument, he glanced at her, worried that the state of things in her life was taking the fight out of her. But she continued her silence as they drove closer to the meeting place.

oOo

Admittedly, it was a pretty bold way to go. While he remembered how to make those science-project volcanoes, he had never thought to actually taste one. The combination of oatmeal and the other ingredients left him a sour taste in his mouth, a bit gritty actually, but the effect had been spectacular and convincing. For two days he had complained of nausea and a stomachache, had downed enough antacid at U.S. Marshal Hernandez's request to quell any discomfort for a solid month, had given the marshals every indication that he was ill. All day he had presented the symptoms he'd garnered from that soap opera and all day he'd agreed with the marshals that the discomfort and pain would eventually pass.

Until it didn't.

He'd chosen to put the final punctuation on his performance that night with the volcanic eruption of whatever food he'd "_managed_" to eat that day. If anything, the trick worked a bit too well, spewing forth and sending the other men skittering out of the eruption's path as he tried to make his case.

Even Roberts looked a little green.

Within minutes of a phone call to a superior, he'd been whisked away in the government car, a bowl between his knees and the lights trying to scream through the dark as they raced toward a hospital.

If his first action had had to be bold, the next was going to demand something far more dynamic and flexible. While he had little **faith** he could outrun the men who hung around the curtained area in the emergency room, caught between their own sense of duty and self-preservation, he did think _any_ distance might work to his advantage.

Distance and a moment alone.

Stephanie McNamara deserved her fate as did Judge Palter, but he had no desire to hurt anyone else, only to find his way to Dr. Brennan at the Jeffersonian and through her, Agent Booth.

So he lay down in the bed and waited for an opportunity that had to come.

oOo

The truck bucked along the road, the compacted dirt seemingly as old and as craggy as the hills around them. Tempe had already slowed the truck to a crawl, but the road resisted at any speed and they found themselves jostling up this stretch that was little more than a gully. He cast a look at the red containers of gas and the larger drums of kerosene and hoped that none of them would spill much less jump out of the truck bed.

"Point two miles," his daughter announced before lurching with the truck as it climbed higher.

Faulty odometer or not, he hoped the road would even out soon. Besides the ungodly bouncing, they seemed to be driving at a 450 angle toward the sky.

"Point one."

At some point they were supposed to hit level ground, but the odometer missed the mark as they continued to climb well past zero. He half-expected her to announce the odometer's error in tenth of a mile increments when the truck suddenly leveled out. As promised, there was a man to greet them.

A man and a very big shotgun.

oOo

The harried doctor poked at his abdomen and he gave his best imitation of a sick man's groans of agony. Grabbing the clipboard that had been left on his bed, the doctor scribbled something and placed the board back on the clip at the end. "I want him upstairs for a blood panel, urine, CT scan."

He nodded gravely, tried to show the knot of pain as best he could and glanced over toward the marshals. By some pre-arranged signal, Roberts pealed off from the group, pulling out his cell while Hernandez hovered.

"Couldn't it just be something he ate?" he asked.

"Patient presents vomiting and tenderness at the right side of the abdomen." The recitation sounded like he was reading from a book. "While we don't have a fever, we do have cause for concern. There's tenderness, but I can't feel any swelling. I want the tests to rule out other possibilities."

"If it's appendicitis?"

The doctor waved off the question. "We don't want to get ahead of ourselves. But if it's appendicitis we'll operate, probably tonight. But we could be looking at kidney stones, or an obstruction. The tests will tell us more."

Hernandez heaved a sigh. "I'll need to stay with him."

The doctor shrugged and moved onto the next patient. The nurse who had been at his elbow, signaled to someone and within minutes they'd drawn blood and were whisking him someplace via elevator, Hernandez in tow.

oOo

The man with the shotgun looked as much like one of the West Virginia hills as he did a man. Tall and craggy, his long hair pulled back, a beard hid much of his face. "You can drop all the gear here and then just turn around and leave," growled the man with the gun.

"I followed the instructions Peter sent us," Max tried to calm the situation. Tempe held her ground, her hands in the air. "This is my daughter, Temperance. She's the reason why I've pushed for this meeting."

That didn't exactly douse the man's ire as he stepped closer, leveling the gun at Tempe and ordering them again to unload the truck and then to leave.

"We just need some information, that's all." He kept his own hands in the air despite the ache in his right shoulder. "A name. One name and then we'll leave."

But the shotgun and its owner remained frozen in anger and the only course of action seemed to be a strategic retreat.

"Is your son Glenn Howatt?"

The name seemed to rattle the man. The gun drooped then straightened as it again pointed at her.

"Who the hell are you?"

oOo

There was nothing elegant about it: a hospital gown, a small jar and instructions on how to put the urine sample in the small window. Hernandez in the hallway. Two doors on this room—the one he came in through and the one the nurse disappeared through. And another one of those signs he had noticed downstairs—cell phone use prohibited.

Do you break the rules if you are Hernandez? He didn't much know or care, he just wanted to make the left turn through the door the nurse had gone through and see if that passageway led somewhere. He'd need to simply lose the gown and grab his pants and shirt that were still neatly folded on the chair in a plastic bag where the nurse had left them.

There really was nothing elegant about it. He slid into the washroom they'd shown him and counted to ten before opening the door and peaking out. The room was still empty and Hernandez wasn't visible through the open door and, well, a moment's lapse was all it took. Grab the bag, walk through the second door and keep going.

_That's an escape. Nothing like those movies they showed in prison, nothing elegant about it. Walk quickly like you know where you're going. Find a washroom and lose the gown. Stuff the gown in that damned plastic bag and leave it in the garbage. Then walk. _

Even walking, twisting around the corridors that seemed maze-like and inefficient, he knew that Hernandez had probably checked on him by now, was looking for him, for the nurse, and the ankle monitor was still weighing on him, weighing him down. Removing it would send up an alarm. But hospitals were full of alarms, things that made noise and he ducked into a room and looked around for something to break the seal. The drawers yielded little help, the hospital world seemingly plastic and flimsy. But he did find a set of blue scrubs and white stretch booties to cover his shoes and pulling these on over his clothes gave him a stuffed appearance, but he didn't much care. He looked like he belonged.

Then walk. But suddenly his ankle began to ping and he realized that he had to lose the ankle monitor soon before it erupted and ducked into another room, a lounge of some sort and began hunting through the drawers looking for anything and found more plastic knives and forks and finally a long knife. It was an uncomfortable fit, knife against skin as he pried off the monitor, and he wanted to just drop it when he noticed the garbage can and bent to it lifting off the top and finding nothing to hide it, to muffle the noise. The ping became louder, more insistent and he knew he would have its siren song all too soon when he decided the best thing was to go back and find one of those laundry things for gowns and such and he left the lounge and turned right—always move forward—and saw an open room, a patient practically sitting up in a bed pushed forward, a spray of tubes running to and around him, a machine blinking and the pinging becoming louder and he slid the monitor along the floor toward the machine, toward his freedom and turned right toward another door, another hallway.

oOo

"Your son is Glenn Howatt. Your facial structure is similar."

"What the hell?"

Max could have said the same thing, but Tempe had the information advantage, the ability to read bones and read in them the story of a person. "She's a forensic anthropologist. She knows bones."

"And what the hell does that mean?"

"It means she sees your son in your face."

"Glenn's dead. He's been dead a long time."

Tempe was not cowed by the man. "He's been dead almost 23 years. Your son killed himself rather than expose you."

"What?" The gun became less menacing than the man who stepped even closer. "You can't know that. Not unless you're one of them."

"No." His daughter was calm, almost too calm. "But I know what they did to him. And to you."

"Who the hell are you?"

"Dr. Temperance Brennan," Max supplied. "She and her partner put away more murderers than you can count."

"One hundred eighty-eight."

Both men stared at her. The point of the gun slumped to the ground.

"We brought the supplies you asked for," Max took the opportunity to restart this introduction. "I brought my daughter because her husband is in jail right now because they trumped up murder charges on him. Probably the same people you've been hiding from all these years."

"We can leave all the supplies here and you'll have to carry them all back to your cabin," Tempe offered, "or we can drive them back there for you." She lowered her hands and Max mirrored her movements. "Either way, you'll get the supplies my father promised you."

The man wavered, the gun seesawing before he finally let the barrel sag completely to the ground. "What the hell do you people want?"

"To save Booth, my husband," Tempe said. Her voice sounded like rain. "And to stop something that's been going on far too long."

oOo

_**Author's note:**__ I have no idea how many murderers they've put away; I have faith Brennan would know. _


	31. Colors

**Colors**

**Author's Note:** _I cheated here. _

oOo

"_Knock. Knock."_

"_Who's there?"_

"_Banana."_

"_Banana, who?"_

"_Orange you glad I didn't say banana?"_

He tried to remember Parker's laughter as a second grader, his glee at the punch line of what had to be one of the world's worst jokes; just what one would expect from a 7-year-old: pure and simple and infectious.

"_What color is a ghost."_

"_Boo!_

"_What happens when you throw a white hat into the Black Sea?"_

"_It gets wet." _

He'd woken early—_had he ever really been asleep?_— to the snores of the man above him and the snores and moans and grunts of the cells around him. There were hours to go before the explosive bang of the cell doors announced the start of the day.

He hated that sound. _His front door explodes in hundreds of shards; he can hear the enemy in his house in the shuffling of feer, the crunch of glass. _It had seeped into his spine, made him jump at the clatter of trays, the clearing of a throat. _Pop. Pop. Pop. _

Shutting his eyes only brought it all back. Or had the darkness of solitary brought back memories he'd thought long hidden? _Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat._ These stretches of days interrupted by the relative safety of the night bled together and he couldn't tell which was worse—the physical violence on his already savaged body or that on his mind.

"_What's black and white, black and white, and black and white?"  
_

"_A penguin rolling down a hill!" _

He tried to conjure Parker's face, his laughter, his joy at those crazy old jokes. Even as a teen, his boy would pull them out and they would marvel at the joy in the shared connection to those days.

"_What's black and white, black and white, and black and white?"  
_

"_A penguin rolling down a hill." _

"_No, Dad. A zebra caught in a revolving door!"_

The laughter, that's what he missed. Laughter.

"_What's black and white, black and white, and black and white?"  
_

"_A zebra caught in a revolving door?"_

"_No!" The giggles erupted into a fountain of pure silly joy. "A panda rolling down a hill!"_

_There were other things he missed. Christine just waking in the morning, her fists tight and then relaxed as her fingers reach out like rays of the sun. Morning kisses, cool and delicate as she just begins to waken. The weight of her in his arms as he pulls her from her bed. _

A bed squawked and instantly he lost Christine to the image of that bastard beneath him, the cracking of bones, the thud of a dead body. The loss of control.

His heart pounded, the beat flooded his ears and his breaths rasped through his chest. She was working to free him. She was. She was. _She was._

He missed her most. But to think of her, to consider her—that razor sharp mind which would never really appreciate Parker's bad jokes but could spar with suspects and bring them to their knees; that pure honesty that rarely allowed him to lie to her or to himself, yet understood the need to hold back just a little; that smile for him alone; that look as she was just about to. . . .

The bunk rocked then thundered around him as his cellmate turned over and he felt the quake as _a mitt exploded and a hard shot to his body as flying glass sliced through him sending him backward onto his shoulder, pummeling his ribs. . . ._

"_What happened when a blue ship crashed into a red ship?"_

"_What hap. . .happened, Parker?"_

"_The crew was marooned! Dad? I don't get that one."_

_Marooned? Marooned is when you are deserted. When you've got no way off the island. When they've forgotten about you. When. . . when. . . . It's like that movie, Swiss Family Robinson. . . when the family is. . . you know. . . like Gilligan's Island. . . and you think they're coming for you. . . ._

Something was wrong with the definition, he could feel it. Maroon? He wiped the tears from his eyes. _Don't cry, Seeley. Boys don't cry._ _Think that's bad? I'll give you something to really cry about._

"_What do you do with a white elephant?"_

"_What do you do with a white elephant?"_

"_What do you do. . . ?"_

The punchline was on him, wasn't it? _What do you do with a white elephant?_

"_Shoot it."_

No.

Bones had fought for him, had his back, was working for him. She'd come back and shot that bastard dead. Kept shooting the damned cockroach that kept getting up, finally going for her. What about the others? The FBI? Were they just more cockroaches?

He drew in a deep breath, tried to find the control. He needed control. Breathe. _Breathe._ _Breathe, Booth. Breathe._

_The face rocks in and out of his consciousness, brunette hair framing her features, her voice commanding, her face in pain. Breathe, Booth. Breathe. Tears wet his face and he can't. . . there's no energy. . . his arms can't move. . . won't move. . . . Breathe. Breathe._

Dammit. _"What do you do with a blue elephant?"_

"_You cheer him up."_

Cheer him up. Breathe. Find control. Think. Think. Think.

"_What's blue and smells like green paint?"_

"_I don't know. I don't know. I don't. . . ."_

Breathe. Breathe, Booth. She needs you. _Don't_ _you_ _die_. They need you_._

_Her face greets him in the morning, in the afternoon, at night. She's reason and purpose and honesty and trust. There are far too few to trust. _

_Trust Parker. And Pops. And Christine. And Bones. Her most of all. _

Steel exploded against steel, the day announced. He shuddered, then tried to hear his son's laughter one last time.

"_What would you call the USA if everyone had a pink car?"_

"_I don't know, kiddo."_

"_A pink carnation!"_

He could close his eyes and pretend to hear a distant innocence, but his days in here were anything but that.

oOo

Night wrapped around them as she navigated the twists of the back roads, the curves of West Virginia not yet giving way to Maryland's straighter lines. Beside her Max slept, the long day and night of intrigue and negotiations too much for him.

But she had a name.

And a story. A man has something that another man wants and the second man destroys the son of the first to pry away his treasure. Avarice. Envy. Lust. A story not unlike the stories they had heard over the last 10 years or so. But in this story, the man who had stolen away what another man had had created a fear so strong that many people were hiding in the shadows, afraid of the light.

John Howatt had been surprised by what she knew, but each bit of information had been paid for with restless nights, a constant thrum of worry, an emptiness that refused to be filled.

She tried to sort through the information, to put each item into its proper place then deduce from it a possible course of action, but the narrow, winding roads required vigilance as even the truck's high beams couldn't quite cut through the blackness.

There was someone in the FBI who had helped Kessler. Booth had figured that out some time ago from the photos and documents Howard Kessler had gathered over the years. The name on the evidence reports—the fake name—turned out to be one of two possibilities: someone who wanted to hide evidence, or someone who wanted to point toward it.

The old truck rattled though the early morning, the tires protesting against the road. She opened the window to stave off drowsiness, the rush of cool air just enough to help her focus.

The change in the steady hum of road noises woke her father. "Uh, honey, are we there yet?" Max blinked, then closed his eyes before opening them again.

"We're still in West Virginia."

She heard her father's deep intake of breath and then his exhale. "You think you have enough to go after what's-his-name? The lawyer?"

"Not yet," she said gripping the wheel tighter. "I can't tie him to anything yet."

"But that pharmacist. . . ."

"He's a physician and research biologist."

"That other guy you talked to, the drug guy?" He shifted in his seat. "He doesn't tie into this."

"No. Not yet." Now it was her turn to sigh. "I haven't found the connection to Booth, yet. "

"So this lawyer might be the key. "

"Maybe." Too much was still a _maybe_. She needed Booth and she needed to see the bones in the lab—_not just the X-rays_. She needed Sweets and Angela to help her look into the lawyer. She needed to hold Christine and Booth and she needed sleep. The lawyer might be key, but John Howatt's information was still twenty years old. "I don't know, Dad. Maybe."

Max settled back in his seat and a glance at him told her he had already closed his eyes.

The road snaked around again, the darkness here unrelenting. Sometimes the headlights would hit a sign or hint at a house or car, but they seemed alone here as the rest of the world slept.

Speculation wouldn't help. Hope might provide a small respite from worry, but it was no substitute for facts. She needed more information, more answers before she could expose the lies about Booth for what they were.

Suddenly she caught movement to the left and slowed the truck. A large doe appeared in the headlights, silent and still, blocking the road. She brought the truck to a stop and turned the headlights off. The wash of light faded quickly, leaving the doe in the middle of the road, tall and dignified. For several moments they remained like that, in check, waiting for one or the other to move.

"She's beautiful," her father murmured. "Remember when we saw those white tail deer in Wisconsin, when we went up to that cabin that summer?"

She remembered. A simple walk in the woods had brought them practically face-to-face with a reddish-brown buck his antlers still in velvet.

"There's others close by," Max said.

"You can't know. . . ," but she stopped as a larger deer, a buck walked into the road followed by a smaller fawn. The buck and the fawn crossed the street before the doe followed, her strides graceful and unhurried.

"That's you," her father continued. "Holding things together just longer enough to free Booth."

"Portents and omens are for people like Angela or her psychic Avalon," she argued as she switched on the headlights. The road, bleached by the light, began to roll past them as she eased off the brake. "Deer are simply deer moving from one. . . ."

She felt Max's hand on her arm and stopped. "Honey, you're doing the best you can right now." He rolled his head toward the window and yawned. "We'll look into that lawyer and you'll find a connection."

"You don't know that, Dad." She tried to eschew all hope for fear of believing in something that might not happen. It had been something she'd learned when she was 15.

"Maybe," he agreed. He patted her arm. "But I know you."


	32. Exploration

**Exploration**

Lady Justice was supposed to be blind; that is, she was supposed to objectively use her scales to weigh the merits of a case without prejudice and then use that double-edged sword of hers to exact swift justice. But in all her years as a prosecutor, the one thing she knew to be true of Lady Justice was that the woman could sometimes be blind, deaf or mute.

And sometimes Lady Justice was just a damned bitch.

Take court that day. The case should have been a slam dunk—the evidence practically screamed his guilt in the murder of that poor woman, his motive was clear-cut if not a bit self-serving and he had practically admitted to killing her and yet, and this was the big YET, the other side was putting up a defense that basically attacked the arresting officer and the forensic scientist who together had combed through the evidence and interviewed the suspect and come up with the facts of the case that pointed at him. HIM. The damned smug weasel was sitting in court looking like he was going to run a marathon in the opposite direction of the courtroom the moment the judge listened to that damned fool nonsense about how the arresting officer couldn't be in the court because he was in jail for other murders and the forensic scientist had been fired from the Jeffersonian. Tainted, that's what they were. _Tainted_. Oh, the defense attorney tried and the defendant looked like he was sitting in the catbird seat, but the judge—thankfully—wasn't swayed and ruled that the arresting officer's notes were good enough and the forensic scientist was there and able to speak for herself, thank you very much.

She thought for the umpteenth time that night that it would be satisfying to hear the jury come back with a guilty verdict and wipe that smug look off that weasel's face. Oh, God, she needed a drink. Something stiff and bottomless, but she figured that the squint's lab was as dry as those bones they were always examining.

Those were her thoughts as she waited out the arrival of the others. Trouble was, she couldn't stop thinking about court and the problems she was sure to encounter down the road on the next half dozen or so cases. Damn. Putting someone like Seeley Booth behind bars for murdering three Delta Force soldiers—scratch that, _three FBI agents_—was just plain ludicrous. Anyone who knew that man knew that he wouldn't murder anyone and if he had murdered anyone, he had just the right partner to hide the corpses so no one would find them.

All right, those thoughts wouldn't ever see the light of day because who the hell knew who was listening these days? Hell, she just went about her business at DOJ, prosecuting the bad guys and trying to keep her conviction percentage high. These days it was all legal metrics and sciency evidence and don't you dare speak the name of the newest _he-who-must-not-be-named _because everyone was trying to distance themselves from the FBI agent gone rogue.

Everything was workable. Judges weren't idiots and the jury could see the tactic was smarmy and low-down deceitful. Go ahead and try to put the focus on someone else. Miss Caroline Julian wasn't going to let the bad guys go free simply because there was a huge miscarriage of justice wrapped up in a conspiracy that was keeping the good guy in the pumpkin farm and his partner on the sidelines.

She let out a big sigh. Without the two of them, without Booth and Brennan, nothing was as it should be.

She grimaced then began to wonder if the squints kept a supply of hard liquor in their offices and considered looking in one of the skulls on Angela's shelves when Dr. Lance Sweets walked in.

One look said it all.

"Where are the others?" he asked by way of greeting. "Sorry. I should say, 'Good evening, Miss Julian.'"

She waved him off. "We're having a meeting of the crappy day society." She let go of the idea of finding liquor in that lab and leveraged herself onto the couch. "Just don't regale me with your miserable day and I won't regale you with mine."

"Deal." He still looked like he might tell her something about his day, but to his credit, he held his tongue.

That's not to say that he didn't pace nor unleash a few sighs and look decidedly like he had a mouthful of something he just had to spit out. But he kept quiet, which, after the day she had in court, she was grateful for.

Angela came in, the quick walk a sure sign that things were moving along now. "Jack said he saw you come in," she said and went immediately to that big screen window to the world she had. "I'm not sure this is much help."

It wasn't. Six seconds of darkness shrouding a man in a helmet that looked like one of those motorcyclists she always seemed to come across as she was trying to listen to something jazzy on the radio. The growl of a hopped-up machine on two wheels always drowned out her music.

"Guy with a motorcycle helmet?"

Sweets did offer up the thing she wanted to say, which earned him a frown and a shake of the head from the artist. "He's one of the guys just outside the house."

"They had cameras outside the house?"

Angela shrugged slightly. "With Pelant and the delivery of a dead body to the house, it seemed to make sense. Brennan made sure the security cameras were on when she took Christine. The flash grenade took out the camera sensor and this is the best I could come up with."

This was the night of **exploration**, to see if they had enough evidence to refute the government's case against Booth and to get him released before it went to trial. Justice might want to act quickly, but the truth of the matter was that just getting to trial might take 12-18 months if they were lucky.

But if this was the best the squint squad had, Booth was going to be incarcerated for a hell of a long time.

"I don't know," came a deep baritone behind her. "Could be one of those Delta Force commandos."

Tall and maturely handsome, David Barron strode into the office, his eyes on the screen where the image kept its silent vigil on an endless loop. Once his presence had made her heart flutter, and while he still could elicit one or two butterflies in her midsection, she could also net them easily enough these days.

"It's too hard to tell what he is," Sweets said, confirming her thinking.

"Well, I've had worse evidence in court," Barron offered. "It's all in how you spin it."

Sweets twisted his upper body into a 450 angle looking at the images, but he still didn't buy into the defense tactic.

"You're going to need something more than 6 seconds of someone holding a bowling ball in the air outside someone's home if that's what that is."

That deep chuckle was all David. "Now Miss Julian, I do think you're just trying to twist the evidence to fit your story."

It was Angela who put an end to the verbal jousting by banishing the image to the background only to replace it with that of a skeleton.

"Is that the reporter?" Sweets was on the mark. "Paul Gillian?"

Angela brought up Gillian's driver's license in reply. "Brennan's finally got her chance to examine the bones and she's going over them carefully."

"As she should," came the deep voice. "If I'm going to have anyone examine the bones, that's the woman to do so."

In silence they concurred.

"I almost think that with all the secrecy and intrigue around this, that we almost need a code name for this." Sweets was staring straight ahead as the screen changed and Angela had added photos from the car crash that had supposedly claimed Gillian's life. "Something like Operation Kudzu."

"Hodgins would like that," Angela agreed.

"Kudzu because it's pervasive, covers everything and chokes the life out of the stuff it covers and it's damned near impossible to kill."

Sweets' comment was anything but flippant. You could practically cut yourself on the edge in his voice.

"You all right, cher?"

"I will be," Sweets offered, "as soon as we clear Booth." He turned toward Angela. "After all this time, there has to be more."

Angela's screen looked like a flipbook as she brought dozens of images up. "I think you'll be surprised."

oOo

He thought that he had been over every square millimeter of that skeleton, but leave it to Dr. Temperance Brennan to find one millimeter he hadn't covered.

So it was a bit more than a millimeter and it was inside the skull, but as long as he'd known the woman, she could look at a bone and find the one thing he hadn't—almost as if the damned bones were calling out to her to see something that had escaped him. Of course, he could blame it on his intern-of-the-moment, Daisy Wicks, but that really didn't seem fair, either.

Instead, he said nothing and simply chalked it up to another reason that the Jeffersonian would do far better with two forensic anthropologists—one who wanted to challenge crime and the other who wanted to challenge history.

In the first fifteen minutes of the first hour of her return to the Jeffersonian, she had found the small chip on the inside of the upper part of the right orbital socket and within minutes, the inside of the skull revealed enough information to give them the length of the blade and particulates that would later indicate that the blade was the kind employed by Delta Force.

And while he should feel regret or even guilt for having missed something, he felt only impressed by the woman. She'd opened with his fine work and closed with some of her own, but in the end, she never once tried to show him up or make it seem that she was faulting him for having missed something.

God, she even thanked him.

Was this the same Temperance Brennan who could be a colossal pain in the ass because she was just so arrogant? The legendary focus was there as was the genius. But there was something else at work as well and he understood it perfectly.

Desperation.

That's why he wasn't standing in her way as she examined each bone. He'd done a good job determining the diameter of the stool, its weight and the weight of the man who had crushed Peter Gillian's ribs. With Hodgins' help, he had also determined the composition of the stool to complete the scenario. But the new evidence gave them an even more complete picture of what had happened.

"Dr. Saroyan's tests will take more time," he offered. "I could go over the reports on the hist. . . ."

"No," she said, interrupting his attempt at ameliorating his oversight. "I've read your notes and all the test results and you've been mostly thorough."

He ignored the left-handed compliment before he realized something. Something that made him wonder if he had always misjudged this woman; misjudged this entire situation. But the question was so fantastical, so wild, he pushed it off to the side as Dr. Sweets entered the Bone Room.

"There's someone at the security guard's station to see you," said the psychologist. "He's insisting he needs to talk to you, but they've told him you're no longer employed here."

"I have work to do here."

She didn't look up, didn't even stop her inspection of the bones as Dr. Sweets stood there awkwardly waiting on her.

"He won't leave the station and the guards are a getting a little edgy about him being there." The psychologist looked furtively—was that the word?—around the room and then leaned in. "I'd rather not say his name, but he's someone who has first-hand knowledge of a certain heiress' actions."

If annoyance had a signature look, it would be Brennan's look to Sweets right then and there. She stopped, looked up and gave him the eye. "I don't really have time for riddles, Sweets."

"H. K."

The initials, spoken with a low whisper, ended the inspection of the bones. Brennan turned and was out the door in a handful of strides without another word, Sweets in her wake.

But the thought that had captured his imagination just a few minutes ago came back with a vengeance and he spoke it aloud to the mortal remains of Peter Gillian.

"I don't think Dr. Saroyan really fired you."

oOo

**Author's note:** _My niece is getting married and my sister is hosting the outdoor wedding at her house. Which means that she comes up with all of these projects for the wedding and has enlisted me in the madness. My apologies for the gaps between chapters. _


	33. Seeing Red

**Seeing Red**

"Well?" The silence on the line caused him more annoyance than concern. "Well?" he repeated.

"They haven't found him."

He could hear the other man's raspy breathing on the line.

"And?"

"And, what?" The petulance was as clear as the annoyance tucked in within the silences. "They've looked into his old stomping grounds. Contacted family members. No one's seen the man."

This time he bit back his own impatience and waited, letting the silence do its work. "And the other thing?"

The rasp of breath this time lasted a bit longer than it should. "He's one tough SOB."

"Yes." He didn't point out the obvious, that the man was a former Army Ranger, that he'd bested three highly trained men. The odds weren't supposed to have worked that way. He shifted in his chair. "It would be best if this situation were cleared up quickly."

"No trial."

"Absolutely.

"And the wife?"

This was a bit more delicate, but not much. "The wife could make trouble."

The breath had a different quality now. "Should we do something about her?"

"No." Laying low was the order of the day. Lay low and tie up the loose threads and then move on. A best-selling author's death coupled with her husband's imprisonment might be too much. "If we can make it look like an accident or a suicide. But at this point, I'd rather we just let matters run their course. The runner needs to be caught. And the other one needs to, well, you know what needs to be done."

"I thought it best to just let it naturally happen."

He tapped on the desk, his fingers playing along the wood as if a piano keyboard. Self-taught air piano, he thought ruefully. Whatever he played of late, the notes did not seem to coalesce into something quite harmonious. "Can we move people around? Put someone in there with him? Someone who in seeing him is **seeing red**?"

He'd learned that the more moves one made in a chess match, the more likely one's opponent would understand the thinking behind it. Here, the more time spent on this matter, the more exposed they were. This should have been laid to rest some time ago.

"I can make some inquiries." The pause worried him. "But if you're trying to keep this lowkey. . . ."

This wasn't the way he wanted things to go. He expected the man to be more decisive.

"Look. Maybe our runner will disappear, maybe he won't. But he can't do much more than he's already done. Our bigger concern needs to be eliminated. I just want it accelerated." His fingers played along the edge of his desk. "The CIA, State, someone might want the doctor to identify someone overseas. She can be disappeared that way if she becomes a problem. There's enough terrorism in the world to keep someone like her occupied if need be."

It wasn't the way he wanted to go, but the loose ends were annoying him like a loose thread or a small mark on his tie.

"But take care of the agent. Without him, they have nothing."


	34. Shades of Gray

**Shades of Gray**

In a word, she was freaking out.

All right, a woman with her life experience: a mother of a young boy, married, an artist who had seen hundreds of dead people, examined their most intimate parts, really shouldn't be freaking much less using that phrase, but the truth of the matter was that that was exactly what she was doing.

Freaking out.

Miss Julian had left the lab, left the building, was probably leaving the East Coast if only to distance herself from the legal entanglement sitting in Brennan's office. Booth's lawyer was gone, too, although his departure had been less theatrical, but no less hurried.

Cam had ushered out Clark as well. Apparently she thought it a good idea that someone should stay out of jail to keep the Jeffersonian's Medico-Legal Lab viable.

Which left the four of them and one decidedly on-the-run killer—who looked a little crazed, in need of a hot bath, a cool bed and some food and probably a jail cell.

All in all, their own legal status seemed to be painted in broad **shades of gray**.

Brennan was in her office—_technically_ _Clark's office_—talking to the man while the rest of them waited down the hall in her office—_until someone hauled them off to jail_—trying to extract something that might which might not only save Booth but save them all.

No, that wasn't entirely correct. The thought made it sound as if she thought her own job was more important than Booth's life. She didn't think that, not really. She just saw Kess. . . _that man's presence_. . . to be more of a complication than they needed. Even Sweets had stayed behind just outside of Brennan's, his right hand poised over that gun on his hip, just in case he was needed.

Miss Julian had given them whispered instructions on who should avoid the escapee, bid goodbye and then hightailed it out of there.

So it had been up to Brennan—Brennan who was focused only on saving Booth to talk to Kess. . . . No, Miss Julian had forbid them to even think the man's name and now, as she thought about it, that might have been part of the prosecutor's colorful exit more than a legitimate legal admonition.

"She needs to find out who his source was in the FBI," Hodgins said. "That could break the conspiracy wide open because that person would have to know who's behind this and where the rest of the bodies are buried."

"Figuratively," Cam offered.

"Oh, no," Hodgins said, winding up. He hadn't stopped moving since _that man_ showed up. His presence had simply wound up that little conspiracy spring inside him and he was off and running. "This has been going on for over 20 years covering at least three administrations and probably dozens of senators and representatives not to mention businesses who have had a hand in the cover-ups and the lies all to benefit people like the Kochs or the. . . ."

"Jack." She'd heard all the conspiracy theories _ad infinitum_ since this had all begun. "Brennan knows what she needs."

"Maybe," he agreed, "but let's not forget that what she already has is very, very dangerous."

"Let's just hope she can use it before it all blows up in our faces," Cam murmured.

oOo

It was like watching that accident on the side of the road—you just couldn't look away.

The glass walls made the images within Dr. Brennan's office enticing enough in a voyeuristic way, but the players inside made it compelling. Dr. Brennan was talking with _the man with the white hair. _A lousy description, but he wasn't supposed to let a known murderer go. who had escaped from the marshals. It was a silent movie of sorts; all they were missing was an organ playing a canticle as the black and white and **shades of gray** danced across the screen. He sighed, letting the breath out slowly. They were in some damned Hitchcock movie, sinking deeper and deeper into the plot with no end in sight, waiting on a miracle.

What they needed was fairly simple—a way to access the DNA profiles of the _real_ guys who tried to take out Booth. He'd looked into the FBI records of the _fake_ guys Booth was to have killed and he got nowhere. Angela had scoured various back doors and databases looking for the information that Dr. Saroyan hadn't been able to obtain. They could tie some of those guys to Foster's death, the attempt on Booth and the killing of Gillian, and while they could go to the President of the United States himself with the information, it would strengthen their position to have the DNA match up precisely.

One of his phones buzzed and he fished it from his jacket pocket.

"Yes?"

He listened as the voice on the other end hesitate and break into an excuse. He'd had enough. "Look, a good man needs help and the information should be on the official record, but it isn't." Firm and angry and annoyed that only a few people were willing to take a risk on this. He waited, the hesitation twisting into something else. He tweaked it some more. "He's helped you. In fact, I know he helped you. Recommended you for the job. Not many would do that under the circumstances."

It might not really be fair as a psychologist to plumb the depths of a person's psyche in such a situation to manipulate them, but he didn't care. The posture of Dr. Brennan hadn't changed and he had no idea if the white-haired man was helping at all.

"Give that to me again."

He reached for a pad and pen, but he couldn't manage it and the phone so he turned and jogged toward Angela's office. "Again," he breathed out, "slower this time."

He repeated the information as he entered the office, mouthed a plea for some paper and then repeated the information again.

Someone used his name, but he waved it off and repeated the information as Angela held out a hastily retrieved pad and pencil.

"Thanks." He heard the phone go dead and he felt the satisfaction of twisting the phone in his hand and splintering the plastic case. "Did you get that?"

"758RT43-GB65399-1135U35-HSXLBRG-0751."

Hodgins defied logic and all those memory studies that claimed more people couldn't remember more than 7 digits at a time and watched as Angela simply kept the pad and jotted down the numbers. Thank God for geniuses, he thought.

"What's going on, Dr. Sweets?"

Ignoring Dr. Saroyan's question, he gestured to Angela to go to her computer, dropping the pieces of phone in his hand. "We have a window of 5 minutes tops," he said. "Log into the Naval Special Warfare Development Group's personnel database and log in as Colonel Paul Haney. One word, capitalize the name and title."

"Is this going to get us in?" Hodgins was at his elbow. "You got a way in?"

"What's the time?" he asked. "Did someone start a timer on this?"

Hodgins checked his watch, made some verbal calculations and calmed him a bit with the answer. "We've got 4 and a half minutes if you're timing it from the end of your call."

He watched as the screen changed and the official Navy seal took over the screen. Seconds ticked by as Angela went past one screen and then the other and finally came to the personnel database.

"This could be a ruse," Hodgins warned. "Someone may not want us prying and this might land us all on the wrong side of Homeland Security."

"It's a good source," was all he could say.

"Do we want to know who gave you this information?" Dr. Saroyan asked.

"The important thing here is that he doesn't want you to know."

Between them, Hodgins and Angela managed to input the user name and password and then they had to wait. And wait.

The screen changed again and he realized he had been holding his breath. No alarms went off, no swat team was barging in on them. He found his voice. "Can you find the. . . ."

"Shhh!" Angela's fingers flew across her pad and photos streamed past as she tried to find the right ones.

"Two minutes left."

He couldn't really say if the seconds went by faster than the personnel records, but they were definitely racing each other.

"Ninety seconds, Ange."

One photo jumped from the stream of images and a personnel record followed. That was tucked over to the side as the stream of photos continued.

"Can't you just do a search. . . ?"

"Quiet!" Angela ordered. Dr. Brennan slipped into the room.

"A minute."

Another image joined the first.

"Thirty seconds."

The database faltered, then stopped altogether.

"No, no," Angela said, frantic. "He's accessing his account." Her fingers danced across the pad, but the screen remained frozen. She logged out quickly and they all stared at the darkened screen, the two records just shy of the three they needed.

"We can log on again and access it when there's no conflict." It was a hopeful thought, but he shook his head at Dr. Saroyan's suggestion.

"They change the password's daily. Hourly if need be." They were always so damned close to cracking this case that it almost physically hurt to be stymied when they were _this close_.

"Can they trace it back to us?"

Angela looked at her pad and at the screen and did more of her finger magic against the pad. "I don't know. I don't think so."

He'd probably put them all at risk, but maybe it was the only way.

"Is it enough?

They looked at each other.

"Yes," Dr. Brennan said finally. "We have enough to prove Booth's innocent." She was staring at the screen. "And I know who's behind this."

"Kessler was helpful?"

She nodded, but she wouldn't say anymore on the matter.

**Author's note:** _Sorry. We're still in wedding wind-up. Soon, very soon, my life will be my own and I can concentrate on the story and not the storybook wedding. Today I was de-pooping the horse pasture so the wedding tent could go there as well as the cars. Where's someone like Angela when you need her? _


	35. Forgotten

**Forgotten**

It was hard to say which were the worst hours—morning as he lay in bed waiting for the doors to bang open and start his day, or the evening as he tried to think past his present and try to recall better times.

Or maybe it was just all the hours he was awake.

He knew the worst part of that day—the hours for visitation ticking away and no sign of her.

Nothing.

Usually she'd get a message to him, a note, a phone call. But today had come and gone with nothing from his wife, nothing to give him a tie to the outside, nothing to give him hope.

All it gave him was a single thought that tumbled around in his head and refused to let go: she was moving on.

That wasn't Bones, not really. The woman who fought her way out of a buried car and certain death and had refused to give up? The woman who did everything she could—and a whole lot she shouldn't have—to save him from Heather Taffett? The woman who stuck by him when he'd broken the engagement? The woman who hadn't given up on the Ghost Killer?

But hadn't she said that she was bad at relationships—and hadn't those relationships gone bad? Hadn't she avoided their relationship because she was certain she was somehow flawed? Hadn't she argued against marriage all those years, argued against monogamy? Hadn't she. . . ?

_No!_ The brainworm seemed to grow louder and more persistent as the hours and days ticked by. _No! No! No!_

_She loved him. Had she told any of the losers over the years that she loved them? Sully? That lawyer do-gooder? That damned professor of hers who turned out to be nothing more than an opportunist bastard? No. She loved him. Him. She'd thrown in with him. Him. To betray him would kill a part of herself, right? Isn't that what she had said? She loved him and was working on something that conflicted with the lousy visiting hours at the pumpkin patch. She loved him and that was that. _

He quieted his mind by controlling his breath, concentrating on finding some kind of oasis, some kind of peace of mind. _She couldn't avoid it, she was doing something important, _he thought, trying to convince himself. And he was _mostly_ convinced. But it didn't stop him from feeling **forgotten**.

oOo

The graceful lines of the famille rose vase on the shelf behind the desk most certainly was Qianlong porcelain. The golden dragons at either side of the arched upward then turned their faces toward the top of the vase, the detail along their bodies exquisite. And while the vase commanded attention—and probably a steep price at auction—it almost paled in comparison to the jade ruyi scepter. Carved from a pale grey-green stone, the scepter's head showed a scene of Shoulao holding a peach while its length depicted the gathering of the fruit. The scepter, a symbol of power, could have been a twin to the scepter on display in the Forbidden City.

Those items as well as other Chinese artifacts—cong vases, an early jade bowl, a large ivory carving of horses running the length of one of the walnut shelves—displayed a taste for fine Asian antiques. An expensive taste.

She'd been told this was the only corner office in the building, a coup for its occupant as the windows looked out over the Capitol Building and provided more than a glimpse of the mall.

This was the office of J. Michael Cahill.

Over the years both Booth and Sweets had emphasized how the environment made the man, but neither one of them needed to teach her that; she had known that lesson all-too-well from anthropology. Besides, it didn't take the expensive leather chairs or the burl walnut paneling to tell her what she needed to know about the lawyer who worked in this office.

She knew who he was; she knew what he had done.

"Dr. Brennan?"

She turned toward the voice. An exhaustive search by Angela had turned up only one twenty-year-old photo, but it had been enough. While his hair had turned white, and the firm elasticity of his skin had gone slack, his facial bone structure hadn't changed.

"Mr. Cahill."

He gave her a slight smile, a tilt of his head—two movements she could not read for any kind of significance beyond what they were—as he swept his hand toward one of the chairs in front of his desk.

"Your publisher insisted that I see you," he said as he made his way to his own seat behind his desk. "Said you were writing a book about something to do with corporate law and you needed some insights."

"Yes," she said as she sat down, the lie easy under the circumstances. "You have an impressive collection of Chinese artifacts."

Then the pause. She let the silence lengthen until he broke it. "Art," he corrected her. "I like to think of it as art. That scepter you were admiring, was a symbol of power during the Qianlong Dynasty. But the earliest examples were quite possibly used as _talking sticks_."

"They were called tanbing during the late Han dynasty," she offered. "The nobles and literati often held ruyi and used the sticks during the Six Dynasties period much like the zhuwei or fly whisk."

Cahill broke into a broad smile. "I. . . I see you are more than just an admirer, Dr. Brennan." He tilted his head again and she wondered if that was because of an astigmatism. He held out his hand to her, palm up. "I give up the zhuwei to my learned guest."

She gave her own slight nod. "It's a book about a conspiracy deep within the United States government which involves the FBI and government officials all colluding in order to cover up several illegal activities including murder in a bid to gain more money and power for a few."

His face crinkled into a smile. "I imagine that kind of story has been told before, Dr. Brennan." Shaking his head, he continued. "I take it you need a better understanding of corporate law, but I'm not sure how I can help."

"I do extensive research on my books," she admitted. "The forensics are based upon scientifically accurate information. But I am not well-versed in corporate law."

Cahill pulled at his earlobe. "I've been told your stories are imaginative and different than the run-of-the-mill pulp crime novels. I'm intrigued."

She took a deep breath. "A lawyer figures into the conspiracy. I'm not sure if he's the blackmailer or if he's the blackmailer."

"The man behind the curtain?" He leaned back and his fingers began to play a silent tune along the edge of his desk. "I would think as the author you would know precisely what role each of your characters plays. But really, Dr. Brennan, I would think you'd use something less clichéd than that. The lawyer as the villain?"

"The lawyer holds as many secrets as does the FBI agent involved," she countered, "maybe more."

"FBI agent? You have quite a far-ranging idea for this novel of yours." His fingers continued to dance along the desk. "Corporations are not evil, Dr. Brennan, simply because they command some leverage within the economy. But the current climate for corporations is not necessarily conducive to growth. That is why many businesses are looking to establish their headquarters overseas."

She bit back a retort about corporate inversion and kept to the script. "Lawyers hold many secrets for their clients, especially wealthy clients. This particular lawyer helped hide his client's abuse of his children as well as sexual abuse of his servants and friends of his children as well as the man's other illegal activities."

The smile had long vanished. "I'm surprised you know so little about how lawyers operate," Cahill replied. "You're suggesting a multitude of illicit activities." The finger playing stopped and he raised his hands and spread them wide. "I'm not really sure why your publisher wanted me to meet with you since you seem to be well-advanced in your disdain for this lawyer."

She heard Booth's voice in her head, the reminder that they were simply putting pressure on the suspect by laying out what they knew in order to elicit a mistake of some kind. He might think the lesson long-**forgotten**, but she'd always been a good student, someone who could file away information for later use.

"There is a death, a murder by a prominent businessman's daughter. The lawyer works with a police officer in covering it up." She kept her eyes on Cahill, taking in everything if only to ask Sweets about those actions later. "The police officer later becomes an FBI agent and continues to help the businessman hide a series of murders as well as use information against other people within the government to cover up the businessman's crimes or to broaden his power base." Cahill's fingers had long-since been stilled along the desk's edge. "A reporter uncovers some of the criminal activity by the businessman, but is killed before the information can be brought to light. Years later, a second reporter comes upon some of the information regarding the blackmail, but is also killed."

Cahill said nothing, the line of his mouth hard and unforgiving. She continued.

"An FBI agent investigating the second reporter's murder comes upon the blackmail files, but before he can expose the people responsible, three Delta Force commandoes are sent to his home to kill him." She leveled her eyes with Cahill's. "He's incarcerated, accused of murdering three FBI agents sent to serve a warrant because the FBI conspirator and the lawyer fear what he knows. As you know, it is dangerous for law enforcement in prison. They hope he will be killed while jailed so as to eliminate him as a threat."

She waited. The trick, Booth had taught her, was to remain calm, matter-of-fact, but her heart was beating faster than normal, and she had to force herself to monitor her breathing if only to tamp down the anger threatening to overflow into the interview.

The vein near Cahill's temple danced to a quickened beat and his skin appeared mottled and flushed. He tried a smile, but even she could see the falseness in it. "I'm not sure how I could help you, Dr. Brennan." He stood slowly. "Lawyers are often cast as the villains in these pieces. It comes with the territory, I suppose. But I truly do not have time to debate the merits of your novel."

Rising to her feet, she wondered if she had done enough, but Cahill's physiological response seemed weighted in her favor. Tiny beads of sweat had appeared at the philtrum and he seemed to want to push her out the room as quickly as possible.

"Thank you for your time," she offered as she turned toward the door. Turning back to him, she pointed toward the scepter. "The ruyi? The bat, the peach, the tree," she said, "all are enduring symbols of longevity."

"But even the Qianlong Dynasty ended, Mr. Cahill. Change is inevitable."

She held his eyes for a few seconds longer, then turned back toward the door and left.

oOo

"You have everything you need in that box, Dr. Saroyan? You haven't **forgotten** anything?"

She nodded before verbalizing her answer, the file box of evidence on her lap seemingly bigger than the small car that Miss Julian was driving. She'd never have taken Caroline Julian for a plush-covered steering wheel or a car no bigger than a sardine can, but the late model—_hell, she wasn't even sure what model the thing was_—knew where it was going even if she had to hold onto anything within reach for dear life as it bumped and ground its way through the streets of Washington.

"Sweets and Dr. Brennan will wait on the call from Angela." She swallowed her words as the car hit a pothole and sent them both toward the roof of the car before dropping them to the seats. "If they don't hear from us, they go to the newspapers."

It wasn't her plan, wasn't her idea to try Booth's case in the court of public opinion, but that's exactly what they were going to do if they couldn't get the charges against him thrown out and him released from jail. They were on the way to the Department of Justice, on a mission to talk to Caroline's boss's boss's boss if need be to end Booth's nightmare.

The car groaned as they rounded a corner and squeezed her against the door which she prayed was shut tightly. When gravity released her, she pushed the lock button down and put in a second prayer that the lock worked.

"Did our Sweets pick up Dr. Brennan yet?"

She checked her phone, a feat in itself as she had to contort her body to get to her phone, then somehow turn it on. "Yes," she said finally, the message from Dr. Brennan terse and to the point. "Now we just have to wait on Angela."

Plan A was for Brennan to let J. Michael Cahill know that they knew that he was working with someone in the FBI to subvert justice and had been for years. Then, if Sweets was right and the bastard was arrogant enough call his FBI contact, Angela would trace it and they would know who he was working with. Their task—if they survived the drive in the tin can car—was to get the DoJ to drop the charges against Booth and have him released.

If that failed, Plan B was to expose the conspiracy—as much as they knew so far—and let the dominoes tumble. And hope that Booth would be released.

Signing on to be the latest Edward Snowden just had not appealed to her—to any of them—but they had enough evidence now to cast doubt on the charges against Booth and to draw lines to Cahill and someone in the FBI. That someone was still a bit shadowy, but there was little doubt they would get him released no matter what. Then with Booth on the outside they could take on the dark forces. . . .

The car rocked left and she found herself leaning so far toward Miss Julian she could have taken the steering wheel herself.

"Do you have to drive so fast?" she grumbled as the car straightened out and she found herself in her own seat and holding on for dear life.

"I'm only doing the speed limit, cherie," countered the prosecutor. "I'll let someone else play the part of the hell-bent, go-for-broke at break-neck speeds in this little movie," she added, "but I think it best we get to where we're going without too much drama. That can come later."

The red light ahead spelled trouble and she braced her feet against the floorboard and her right had against the dashboard while her left bragged the seat beneath her. "I'm going to buy you a new car once this is over," she hissed between her teeth. "Preferably made before the turn-of-the-century."

"Why, cherie?" Caroline asked as the car ground to a stop. "This little baby has been with me for years and knows my ways."

The red light allowed Cam to relax her grip on the seat, but she found the need for both hands as her phone buzzed.

"Is our little sweetie pie right about the big bad wolf?" Caroline asked as she pushed the groaning car past the intersection as the light went green. "Is he foolish enough to think we aren't looking as he's huffing and puffing?"

She almost lost the phone as the car lurched forward, but she grabbed at it and touched the screen to bring up the message.

"Sweets was right," she said as she hung on for dear life, the car taking a corner and pushing her back into her door. She righted herself with the car straightening out and read the text again. "Angela's got a location for the big, bad. . . for the FBI contact.. . . ."

Scrolling through the message, Angela's computer skills became apparent as the artist even pointed out the location of the recipient of Cahill's call.

"She's got the call ending with someone in the Hoover," she said, the message only confirming what she had feared.

"So Dr. Brennan's little visit worked?" Caroline screwed up her face and honked her horn at a car passing them. "Wish she could work some of her scientific magic on these drivers."

Cam was about to put her phone away when another message announced itself. Reading through it, she had only one response.

"Oh, my God."


	36. Dreamer

**Dreamer**

Years ago when life had been a waking nightmare, he had burned a wish in a candle he'd snuck into his room. Then he had willed the smoke to carry the message to the universe, a plea to rescue Jared and him from the alcohol-fueled rages of his father. It had been a vain wish only made real by divine intervention that had somehow sent his grandfather to their rescue and given them a real chance at a life.

What he wouldn't give now for the same kind of miracle.

Rubbing at his knuckles, newly bruised from another skirmish with a couple of other inmates, he tried to still his mind long enough to focus. Silence from Bones might mean she'd lost track of time, might mean she was in trouble. He scratched at his beard and found himself sending up a prayer to keep her and his children safe if that were the case.

All in all, it was the only wish that really mattered now.

Every day seemed more of a struggle, and the boy who had once been a **dreamer** and believed that wishes could come true, still had reason to believe as a man, but it was growing more difficult in this concrete tomb. His ribs ached, his hands felt bruised and raw, and the other aches—the wear and tear of years of service to his country—only made each day more difficult. The hypervigilance of a boy-turned-man-turned-soldier-turned-cop served him well, kept him sharp, but he was growing tired, so very tired.

oOo

Security breach.

It was really the last thing he had expected when Dr. Saroyan had called and asked him to come in. He'd pulled himself from his dissertation, then pulled together the evidence she had given him to hide. That alone had held a hint of danger given everything, but this?

Forty-five minutes after watching Dr. Saroyan leave the lab with a file box full of evidence, he'd looked up from his computer to an FBI guy flashing a badge and herding him from his office to a spot just outside the Autopsy lab. FBI techs were already at work at the computers on the platform.

He looked over at Hodgins who was practically staring a hole through the wall of Angela's office where the FBI techs were going through her computer. He'd spent enough time with the man to know that the nervous energy radiating off the guy was more than just being proven right about his conspiracy theories.

"You think these guys are legit?" he asked under his breath. "Really looking for a breach?"

His answer was a view of Hodgins cell—no signal bars and a whispered, "Blocked. I've never seen these guys before."

That was enough to up his own nervousness.

"Angela?"

A small flick of Hodgin's head gave him no information.

"She wasn't in her office."

Hodgins only made the flick of his head even more pronounced.

"Ever deal with this Agent First before?" This time the flick went horizontal.

And his own anxiety went vertical.

They were probably tearing into the Angelatron and destroying all the evidence on it related to Foster and the latest victim. And Angela was in the wind, out of sight, maybe hiding out in the woman's washroom for all he knew.

"They can't legally jam a phone signal, can they?"

"They can do anything they want," Hodgins offered, his voice low. "They aren't FBI."

_And even if they were,_ a voice inside his head finishing the thought_, look what the FBI did to Booth._

A broad-shouldered guy was standing guard at the main door, his FBI jacket doing nothing to hide the bulge at his side. There was another in his office presumably on his computer while another one was digging through files in the bone room. Another had already pronounced Dr. Saroyan's computer '_clean'_, whatever the hell that meant.

Voices in his head were warring with what he was seeing, a voice much like Dr. Brennan's reminding him to gather as much evidence as he could while another voice, very much his mother's, cautioning him about getting in too deep.

And his own voice, a bit louder than both of those, barking out a bunch of questions that might be better not answered.

"They'll just wipe the computers and leave, won't they?" he asked, his voice low, the big guy at the door looking a bit more observant than the typical rent-a-cop.

Hodgins got that look—_that one_—the one that made him wish he hadn't been so conscientious about finishing up on the Collier file and the Limbo cases while he was already in the lab. If he had ever thought his friend a perpetual **dreamer** when it came to conspiracies, the very real presence of people with guns and motives to keep them quiet had taken a decidedly different turn.

"You mean. . . ?"

He let the question dangle and was rewarded with a nod from Hodgins that made him feel all of his 30 years and each one of the cancer cells trying to take him down.

They needed a plan, a way out of there because he sure as hell couldn't run faster than a bullet. Hodgins was too far away from his own lab to pull a Mr. Wizard out of a test tube. And if Hodgins even thought for a second that Angela was still in the lab somewhere, he wasn't going to leave her.

He wouldn't be able to leave her, either.

Hodgins gave a sidelong look at their stone-faced guard and murmured, "You're not looking too good there, Wendell."

He'd always considered himself pretty smart, but the circumstances and maybe the late hour had already taken their toll, but it took a couple of seconds before he caught on.

"Yeah, I'm, yeah, feeling a bit nauseous," he said, clutching at his stomach. It was lame, something out of a B-movie, but he was willing if Hodgins was.

"He's going through chemo," Hodgins said, taking up the cause. "I work with dead bodies, but the stuff that comes out of him is pretty bad."

Old Stoneface gave him the stink-eye and a nod toward the restroom, but he realized he'd be going solo and that wasn't going to work for him. Instead he fell to one knee and sent up a hail of groans, weeks of chemo giving him plenty of material to draw from. Hodgins, too, took a second to catch on, but he helped haul him to his feet and provided some support as they both made their way toward the restroom.

It was a little too good to be true.

"Where're you going?"

Agent First, a man of some vintage, was surprisingly fast on his feet and had caught up with them before they could get past the janitor's closet. Hodgins wore a mask of concern as he tried to sell the agent on the need for some expediency.

"He's going through chemo for. . . ."

"Ewing's Sarcoma," the agent supplied. He was the poster child for annoyance. "He can go by himself."

"That's not really a good idea," Hodgins tried to argue.

Old Stoneface had joined them, bookending them with Agent First on the other side. "He can go when I get some answers. Where's Miss Montenegro?"

Hodgins was obviously—_well, obviously to him, at least_—playing them. "I don't know. Angela doesn't always check in with me. Did you try the restroom?"

For his part, he tried to play along, appear ill while making the right sounds to turn this into a time-sensitive emergency.

But the faux FBI types were having nothing to do with it. In fact, Agent First became a little too calm.

"It would help if we could talk to Miss Montenegro about her security protocols for the lab. It would help us pinpoint the origin of the security breach to know what instruments are in place."

Hodgins shrugged. "Angela's pretty thorough about all that," he offered. "I don't really understand it anymore than she understands about my _janitorem scriptor cubiculum._

His Latin was a bit rusty and it took him a bit too long to translate Hodgins's words to something meaningful. First was trying to separate him from Hodgins and send him on his way when he finally understood that something was important about the janitor's closet.

Angela was hiding _there_?

He didn't hold out too much hope for this branch of the FBI if they hadn't secured the janitor's closet or the woman's restroom for that matter, but he gave out a large groan and tried to draw in his friend's assistance if not the agent's sympathies.

"Arghh, man, Hodgins, I really have to. . . ."

But he was cut off; no, really yanked off as old Stoneface grabbed at his left arm and hauled him upright causing weeks of chemo to seem like nothing as the limb screamed in agony and he followed suit.

Hodgins was doing his best to rescue him from being further manhandled, but he heard someone order them both into an office and he felt himself shoved and pulled and dragged someplace as searing pain separated his brain from thought and he could only feel himself crumpling against a cold hard floor.

oOo

"I think we're being followed."

He'd been glancing at each mirror in turn and the image hadn't really changed. A black car had probably been tailing them since they'd left Cahill's office building and he hadn't caught it until they were a block from the Jeffersonian. Now the image seemed to be coming at them, menacing in its mystery.

"Black Honda. Can't read the plates."

"Pull over."

His heart was beating a little too loudly in his ears and he was sure Dr. Brennan could hear it as well as he went to put on his blinker, but the next thing took him by surprise as she grabbed at the wheel with surprising strength pulled them off onto the shoulder where the car bucked and the tires protested until instinct took over and he put on the brakes.

The Honda sped past them without a wave goodbye.

He finally let out the breath he was holding. She hadn't let go of the wheel and they sat there while other cars zoomed past and the tattoo of his heartbeat calmed to only a steady beat of anxiety.

He dropped his head and let it rest against the steering wheel before looking over at his companion.

Dr. Brennan was watching the traffic, watching him, and he was dying a bit inside. He was supposed to be her protector in Booth's absence, her gun, but he'd panicked and been more of a day**dreamer** than anything of any substance.

"You think they were following us?"

"Yes."

That single word came out like a punch to his gut and he looked at her, really looked at her and tried not to flinch as she looked back.

"They probably know we're headed back to the Hoover."

"Yes."

She wasn't backing down. She'd confronted Cahill so they could do the end around with Caroline and Cam and she just wasn't going to let them intimidate her.

But she was terrified. She'd admitted as much on the way to Cahill's office and they'd just upped the ante by letting Cahill know they knew. . . .

"Okay." _Okay_. He turned back to the steering wheel and turned on his blinker and watched the traffic for an opening and pulled the car back into traffic. "We're headed toward the Hoover."

_And whatever they found there,_ he thought as he glanced at the mirrors, catching sight of Dr. Brennan, _we'll face it together._

oOo

"Ten four four seven? Booth."

He turned toward the guard's voice, tensing for another round of ridicule or abuse, but the man was trailed by another man dressed according to typical G-man code: clean shaven, short hair, dark suit, white shirt, conservative tie, black shoes. Booth scratched at his beard and waited for the guard to say something.

But it was the government's man who did the talking. "Seeley Booth?" The ID came and went with a snap of the man's wrist. 'I'm Special Agent Clay Bateman, here to escort you from this facility. You're being released."

It took far too long for the words to register so the guard ordered him to get up. He ignored the guard.

"Released?"

The guard was already sliding the door out of the way, but Booth held his position on his bunk.

"The charges were dropped. I don't know anymore than what I've told you."

"Is Bones waiting for me?"

The government's man stood stock still like one of the targets on the tactical range. All he needed was to have one of those paper guns pointing at him. "Bones? I'm here to escort you to see FBI Deputy Director Stark."

He got his answer he needed. He stood slowly, deliberately.

"Get your gear."

The guard was standing impatiently at the opened door, an air of wariness around him.

"Why am I to see Stark?"

"Just get your. . . get up and follow this man out," the guard repeated, his disdain showing. "Get your stuff."

He hesitated again, then retrieved the few possessions he had and followed the agent out of the cell and down the hall. But he couldn't be sure of where any of this was going.


	37. Mist

**Mist**

_**Alice in Wonderland **_had nothing on her. Or was she somehow some character from _**The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe**_?

Through the back of the janitor's closet and down the stairs into the musty storerooms of the Jeffersonian and then it was a _**Choose Your Own Adventure**_. One way took her deeper into storage areas and the other to workrooms and still another took her out of the building.

And freedom.

She felt for the hard drive again and wished for the hundredth time in her short journey that they had invested in something cool like Foster's nipple ring. A lighter. A heel that attached to her shoe. An aglet for her laces.

Her mind had settled in fantasyland primarily because she was so very, very frightened.

Jack's instructions had propelled her so far into the bowels of the museum complex and if she stopped and thought for more than a second or two, she was ruined. She'd turn around and march right back to her husband and stand with him as they faced whatever was going to happen the only way two people who loved each other should: together.

But his instructions kept roiling around in her mind on an endless loop: _Get as far away from here as possible because you're our only hope to expose the people responsible for all this and you're my hope that Michael Vincent will grow up into a fine man._

It was one of his longer speeches, but no less important as it fueled her escape from the lab with the entire set of computer files on her old iPod.

If it was good enough for Peter Jackson to transport dailies from the _Lord of the Rings_ trilogy, it was good enough for her.

Damn, she was losing it; she had officially turned left into geekdom.

Making a right, she kept watch for the security cameras outside the workrooms and skirted those down a dimly lit hallway that fed into a larger passage leading into God-only-knew what. The hall had a definite gothic vibe to it. An emergency light at the other end of the hall beckoned and she started toward it, shuffling her feet for fear that she would trip over something in the dark. She pulled out her phone and stumbled through the menus until she came to her flashlight app.

The hallway looked much better in the dark.

But it was clear and free of cameras. Being married to a paranoid conspiracy theorist had rubbed off and she had spent more than one afternoon piecing together the security scheme at the Jeffersonian. A parting shot for the FBI techs which had swarmed down onto the lab had been a trail of turned-off cameras to act as breadcrumbs if needed. Hansel and Gretel could have used her and a bit of technology to make their own escape.

Another left, a right and a climb up stairs in one of the older parts of the museum complex had taken her far from the lab.

But it was drawing her back.

Jack was in danger and the best she could offer him was a stale donut on her desk and a brick—_well, half a brick_—in the bottom of her bag that was stashed in a drawer.

She tried his number on the off chance that he might be able to pick up and reassure her that he was all right, but the call went to voice mail.

"Oh, Jack," she murmured, the worry ratcheting up. She tried Wendell's number and Cam's, but each one went to voice mail leaving her feeling frustrated and more uneasy.

She could hide the iPod at one of the workrooms and saunter back into the lab, but she wasn't entirely sure she could retrace her steps in the labyrinth of halls down here. Besides, living with a conspiracy nut had drilled into her head the need to avoid giving the bad guys more leverage.

And like it or not, her return might hurt the situation more than help it.

Walking away from the lab was her best weapon and maybe Jack's best defense. Turning a corner, she caught the familiar red of an exit sign and headed toward it.

The crash door didn't send up an alarm and she found herself in a light evening **mist** and within sight of the trash containers.

She really had only one more play and she made it, picking the name from her menu and punching in a 2.

This one thankfully didn't go to voice mail.

"_Brennan_."

oOo

The place seemed familiar and yet not really. Through the back entrance and security and to the bank of elevators he was waiting for the punch line, the clown jumping out from behind a corner and yelling at him, "Gotcha!"

He really didn't know why he should be here, of all places.

The FBI had no love for him, sent him to jail, accused him of murdering three of his fellow agents, wouldn't listen to a damned thing he said. Wouldn't believe him. Left him to be the punching bag for the creeps he'd put in there. Then they'd pulled him out of jail, gave him a driver who either hated his guts or wanted him dead, but was doing this because he'd been ordered to, and delivered him to the Hoover with a T-shirt that looked familiar and a pair of jeans that were too big.

And a belt.

Probably meant to hang himself with it.

That's how the day had gone before his driver deposited him outside Stark's office and left him to stew here.

No secretary, no assistant. After regular hours. He was sure the guy had the means to end this right here and now.

But was that the anger talking? The uncertainty? Some guy shows up and says you're free and doesn't even have half a story to give you and then you're deposited like some homeless waif on the doorstep of the guy who should have believed you. Should have trusted you to be telling the truth despite the evidence.

Because someone had faked the evidence, faked it with McNamara, faked it with Foster.

He paced, tried to still his mind that did its own nervous walk, trekking through old wounds and emotional pits and coming back to the same conclusion.

He was done with this.

Being a Ranger had taught him that sometimes there came a point when you had to stop doing what you were doing and move onto something else. He had been good at killing, good at finding the target and ending it. But he had hated it; hated the stain that had grown onto his soul with each death. Hated knowing he was but a hair trigger away from making a mistake or becoming one of the targets.

Staring out the window from the—hell, he didn't even care how high up in the air he was, how damned important Stark might be—he saw the rain leave a **mist** on the glass outside, each droplet growing bigger and bigger as they joined more droplets and finally grew too heavy and gave into gravity which pulled them down.

He wasn't going to be that damned droplet anymore.

"Booth?"

The voice came from behind him and he turned slowly, deliberately, the call of masters no longer his concern.

Stark stood there in that same dark grey suit, the same white shirt and conservative tie, another drone in a world of drones that seemed to push buttons and push people around and never really listen to the truth.

"I'd like to apologize. . . ."

He couldn't listen to this. "You'd like to? You mean you can't?"

He'd fought several men at a time to stay alive. What had Stark cared about that? For all he knew the man had put him in the pumpkin patch and waited for him to be picked and sliced and carved up into some kind of something and forgotten until the next person stumbled into the slime and filth and tried to clean it up only to be drowned in the slop.

Stark had the sense to look sorry.

"I am sorry. We made a mistake."

"Mistake?" He was his father now, the rage burning white hot and he felt his body tense and shift into an offensive posture—hands curled into fists, muscles ready, his feet apart in a stance ready to take any kind of blow he was given.

"Miss Julian and Dr. Saroyan went to see the secretary himself on this. Detailed how we had treated a decorated FBI agent. Detailed just how wrong we had gotten it."

Something was wrong with that statement. Something he couldn't quite pick out.

"There's a cancer deep within the FBI if we could get this as wrong as we have." Stark shifted, relaxed almost. "It's not enough to tell you that we are sorry, that I am sorry," he said, "but that we need to clean out this cancer."

"Or we're no better than the people we put behind bars."

It took a great deal of time for him to sort through the words and to make sense of them. He'd spent so much time alone within the company of men who had no use for him that he actually had to replay the words in his head again and again before he understood.

"Good luck with that."

Stark's expression changed just a bit. "I was hoping to reinstate you and work with you to find out where we've gone wrong."

Months ago he might have jumped at the suggestion, but right now he was too sore and too angry to jump at anything. He was having a difficult time simply holding his temper in check.

"I made a horrible mistake, Booth. I've inherited a terrible disease deep within the bureau and it needs to be removed or it will destroy us."

At one time he could tell if people were lying to him. But time and a brain tumor had stolen away that ability and he wavered now over what Stark was saying to him if only for the months of living in a cage.

"All I want is to find out who did this to me and my wife and children and then I am done with the FBI," he said finally. "You can reinstate me or not."

Stark considered the conditions and bent to the desk and retrieved a gun and a badge. The sound of the gun thumping on the desk had a definitive sound much like the opening of a cell door. "I had them brought up here when I was contacted by the DoJ of your release." He seemed to be waiting on him. "This is your play, Booth."

He eyed them, wondered if this were some kind of cosmic joke. Less than 2 hours ago he was locked up and unsure of a future. And now?

The gun and the badge would force him to work within his oath—the FBI's betrayal would never really change that. And he wasn't going to let someone steal months from his life, threaten his life and the life of his wife without a fight.

But was this was how he wanted to fight back? Within the system that had abandoned him?

He wasn't sure he could trust the system anymore than he could trust Stark, but the gun and badge seemed to be calling to him.

oOo

She ended the phone call, but the terror in her friend's voice remained. They didn't have Booth, didn't have much trust in the FBI, but they did have something the men who had invaded the lab didn't have.

"We need to go to the lab."

Sweets had pulled them over under a street light, the **mist** in the air collecting on the windshield, causing the various lights around them into the prisms of each droplet.

"Dr. Saroyan said that they were considering the new information," Sweets countered. "I think it's better if we take this to the FBI and let them sort it out."

"Hodgins and Wendell are still in the lab," she argued, the lights around them dancing as a car drove past where they were parked. "We can't leave them there."

"What if we call the police? The police probably can be trusted." Sweets was reaching. "I can't believe they'd hurt them."

She felt the frustration of talking this through when it was clear what they needed to do. "The FBI was in the lab well before Cam and Caroline arrived to the Department of Justice. Well before I met with Cahill. It's entirely possible that the FBI will claim that they are investigating a problem at the lab and take Hodgins and Wendell into custody and charge them with violating security protocols."

"There's a leak," Sweets said as he shifted into drive and hit the windshield wipers before craning his neck to check for cars then pulling out onto the street. The wheels protested against the wet pavement. "They've been watching or listening in. . . man, we need a plan. Do you have a plan?"

"To get them out of there," she replied. But she knew that without knowing all the variables, they could just as easily be driving toward a trap that could destroy them all.


	38. Burning

**Burning**

**Author's Note: **_My sincerest apologies for posting this again, but I'm repairing an apparent duplication of the chapter. Definitely my fault rather than the fine people here at FF. I'm desperately trying to reunite B&B before the premiere and wasn't very careful. _

oOo

"You just get your fine self over to the lab and rescue those squints like only you can do."

Caroline Julian's voice had the crooning quality of a parent speaking to a child, the words soft and singsong, meant to gently tip the listener toward action. Far gentler than anything she had ever heard from the woman before.

"You get over there right away and we'll talk to Dr. Brennan."

The windshield wipers beat out a steady rhythm as they waited, the rain picking up as the night grew deeper and as the silence on the other line grew longer.

Not for the first time did she want to reach through the phone and shake Booth into action, but she waited as the tiny car plowed through the streets, the big man's reticence uncharacteristic.

"Call Bones," they heard on the phone, then nothing more from Booth.

She closed her eyes and sent a wish into the night before the voice on the phone brought her back to the moment.

"I can't let him go in there alone," Stark said. "He'll have backup whether he wants it or not."

"You think he's going to trust that backup?" Caroline's voice cracked sharply like a whip, so unlike her tone with Booth. "Or they're going to trust him, thinking he killed three FBI agents and somehow got away with it?"

Cam watched the phone she held between them as Caroline swerved around a stopped car, **burning** through the yellow light as she tried to retrace their path back to the lab. Watching the phone bob around in her hand was a far better sight than that of the prosecutor trying to do her own version of Steve McQueen on the streets of Washington.

"You're saying any backup I send will probably turn on him." The deputy director's voice sounded resigned and tired. "Damn it. He probably thinks this is a set up designed to kill him or worse, make sure that he kills FBI personnel this time."

"You let that man do what he does best," Caroline said, her tone sharp. "He's not about to let someone hurt one of the squints and get away with it, and he'll do it within the law."

Stark said nothing, but the silence on the line wasn't reassuring.

oOo

"There's no signal," he said, the phone having little use except to light their way through the darkened hallways of the Jeffersonian.

"They must have set up a dampening field inside the building utilizing the. . . ."

Whatever Angela said had been lost in the sound of a door behind them and each one of them froze in place, fear cementing them to their spots.

They waited. And waited. Finally they heard soft shuffling that could have been someone moving toward them from behind.

He cursed his insistence on sneaking in there, sure they could call for help if they were overwhelmed. Now he felt responsible for leading them into a trap with no Plan B at the ready.

But Dr. Brennan was having none of it. She began to creep forward, and like a dog on a leash, he felt he had no choice but to follow, pushing Angela in front of him so he could keep an eye out for their pursuer.

If there was one.

Between them, Dr. Brennan and Angela edged their ways closer to the lab, their movements silent and furtive. He kept his hand on his gun, his ears on a constant vigil for any noises behind them. They made their way down the hallway, practically sliding along the wall, dodging the occasional box holding a fire extinguisher or the recess for a door.

That's probably why he hadn't noticed that they seemed to be moving in a circle, somehow looping back into the same workroom hallways in which they had started. When he realized it, he also realized they were **burning** precious minutes in a foolish attempt to do something best left to SWAT or the FBI Hostage Rescue Team and he stopped the women by grabbing onto Dr. Brennan's sleeve and holding her in place.

Then he saw a shadow in front of him move.

Instinctively, he pushed toward the front and leveled the gun at the middle of the shadow and barked out an order, "FBI. Show yourself."

He held his breath as the shadow moved into the dim light, turning into a man, arms raised, a gun in his right hand.

The shadow spoke. "I'm FBI. If you let me reach into my pocket. . . ."

But the man had no chance to finish. "He's not FBI," Angela insisted.

"He isn't," Brennan agreed.

"Put the gun on the floor," Sweets ordered. "Then kick it over here."

The shadow complied, bending at the knees and squatting, the gun pressed to the floor, but his hand never quite releasing it. The shadow stayed in that position, smiling.

"Kick it over here," he repeated.

Behind them, someone cleared his throat.

oOo

The lab offered up enough challenges without trying to confront an unknown number of targets, he thought, as he made his way into the employee entrance and past guards, his only ticket for admittance, a badge that seemed to burn his fingers. The walk, something he would have done in the past without thinking, now seemed a hundred miles in length.

It gave him time to think, to consider how this was going to go down, but he didn't have much hope. He had only a gun, a couple of clips that Stark had ordered Agent Bateman to give him, and a working knowledge of the layout of the lab.

No number on the hostiles in the lab. Two civilians. Where anyone's position was a crapshoot. He knew the space, though, the labs and offices along the walls, the supports and poles throughout, the upper level that gave him a squint's-eye view of the lab, but a dozen different places where the shadows obscured his view or obstructions that destroyed his sightlines.

He chose one of the back entrances to the lab rather than the main doors, eliciting the guard's help by having him slide his security card, and when that didn't work, using the emergency override.

"In twenty minutes, if I don't contact you, pull the fire alarm," he ordered.

He left the man protesting the order, but he didn't much care. It would be hard to ignore a fire alarm at the museum complex, but he was counting on getting back to him before that was necessary.

The entrance he chose turned the lab into a giant funnel and he made his way through the smaller offices and storerooms, checked the doors, checked inside when he could, before backtracking toward the other offices and supply closets.

Always he was on alert, his body protesting the activity, his muscles **burning**, but his resolve unshaken. He knew Bones, knew that she couldn't resist being in the middle of something and she was more than likely here or near here, ready to effect her own rescue in his absence.

A sound from in front of him, from the far offices echoed back toward him in the large space and he held steady for a moment for another sound. Again, he heard the distance sound, a cry, something he could recognize all too well.

He waited, but the sound remained orphaned and he forced his focus to his task of checking each room.

One of the back rooms had been converted into Wendell's office and he tried the door handle and found it locked. For a second he thought to move on, but something deep within made him pause and he tapped at the door.

"Wendell?"

He tapped again and repeated the whispered word. Holding his position, he wondered if it was just a hope for a familiar face that held him there when he heard a shuffling gait on the other side of the door.

"It's Booth."

Metal hit metal within the lock and the door opened slightly, then more as Wendell saw him.

"You look like hell, man."

Wendell was wide-eyed, but calm and holding his arm.

Booth slipped into the room and Wendell closed the door.

"You okay?"

The younger man nodded, but didn't release his arm. "Dislocated my shoulder."

"How many are there?"

"Five. The guy in charge is an Agent First. I haven't seen Hodgins for twenty minutes or so. Angela got away."

"Where are they?"

"Angela's office."

He took in the information and made a decision. "Can you make a distraction, some noise?"

"Like screaming and waving my arms?"

"An explosion. Smoke, fire, I don't care. Something they can't ignore."

To Wendell's credit, he didn't answer right away. "It's going to take me a few minutes, probably."

Booth thought for a moment. "Can you set it remotely? I want you out of here when the thing goes off."

Again Wendell considered the request and nodded.

"Okay," Booth said. "I'll get you to the lab, then you set the thing on fire for all I care."

He turned toward the door and peeked around it, signaling Wendell to move, before he made his way out of the room and led the younger man out.


	39. Out of time

**Out of Time**

They were ripping his arms off, forcing them back further and further in one of those horrible recreations Angela was always doing for Brennan. The pain ripped through his shoulders and back and he tried desperately to remain conscious despite knowing that oblivion would make the burning disappear, if only for a moment.

But he wouldn't give in.

Each second he could stay with it, stay conscious, was another second that Wendell had to live or Angela could use to get away. He might be **out of time**, but they would have all the time he could give them.

But this wasn't theory or some animations that Angela had cobbled together to demonstrate the latest means to destroy a body. This was fierce and abiding pain that seared through him and caused him to involuntarily cry out in a voice that did not sound like his own.

"Where did your wife go?"

He could play the smart ass, the consummate tough guy or even James Bond in his head. He could play any of those parts, but here in the real world of conspiracy theories and Delta Force commandoes, he was playing only Jack Stanley Hodgins, where pain was real, bones could break and death seemed only a moment away.

"Where did she go, Dr. Hodgins?"

But they were asking about Angela, the mother of his child, the woman he loved with his whole heart and soul and he could give them only one answer as they twisted his arms behind him and up over his head: "Arrrrrggghhhhhhhhhhhhh!"

oOo

The thing that Booth had always instilled in him was to be aware of his surroundings. He'd failed in that and they were trapped between two guys who could be the missing Delta Force commandoes for all he knew.

Of course, that wasn't jiving with what he was seeing; the guy in front was grinning like some feral beast poised on his haunches; he wouldn't expect Delta Force to be so casual.

Awareness. Brennan was to his right, by the wall, by one of those infernal fire extinguishers they'd been dodging. Angela was to his left, slightly behind him, her arms raised in surrender.

And he was staring down the barrel of his gun at a man who was grinning like the Cheshire cat. "Looks like a trifecta," the man announced to the newest shadow behind them, "Dr. Temperance Brennan, Angela Montenegro and," he paused and looked straight at him. "Who are you?"

Sweets held his gun steady and caught a slight movement to the side. "The guy who's going to blow a hole in you if you don't tell whoever is behind us to put his weapon down."

All bravado, but they needed an edge in the stalemate, even a small one. He was prepared to fire, but he didn't like the odds. Dr. Brennan made a small move to her right and he wondered how Booth could deal with her in situations like this when any movement, no matter how slight, could set off a firestorm.

"They're going to kill us," Dr. Brennan said, contributing to the ever-ratcheting tension. "But it would be a mistake. We have what you're looking for."

"You don't want to kill me," Angela protested, her voice shaky. "I've got the hard drive you want."

"We can't prove anything without the information on that hard drive," Dr. Brennan added.

"You really aren't helping," Sweets hissed at her. He directed his next comment to the man in front of him. "You really don't want to die. . . .

"Especially since the information has already gone to the Justice Department," supplied Dr. Brennan. "Cooperating with federal prosecutors generally results in a reduced sentence. You might want to consider that."

"Yes, we can talk to the prosecutor in this case," Angela added to the already unhelpful comments from Dr. Brennan.

"Put down your gun and we can all walk out of here alive," Sweets offered, his voice steady and sure even if he wasn't. Brennan was creeping ever closer to the wall.

The stalemate only deepened, and the shadow behind them sounded closer. "Let's just finish this here and now."

The shadow in front of them reached for the gun, "You're **out of time**," but suddenly a white cloud of smoke hissed around them, Sweets heard a sharply ordered, "Duck" from Dr. Brennan and he dove to the ground taking a body with him as gunfire erupted around them.

oOo

It hurt to see Wendell trying to put together their bomb, but the young man didn't complain and between their three good arms they had the rough makings of something to draw out the men still in Angela's office. They'd worked quickly and quietly and more than once he caught his friend staring at him before turning back to the work.

"All right," Wendell whispered, "this should do it." He handed him a long piece of twine. "You'll want to get twenty, maybe thirty feet away, because we didn't really measure anything. When the potas. . . ."

He cut him off. "Tell me later what you did, Mr. Wizard. Just get the hell out of here."

Wendell nodded and went to leave before turning back to him. "I'll explain all the boring science to you later, man." He paused. "Over a beer. And you can tell me everything then."

He understood the message and the kindness contained within, but said nothing and turned to find himself a safe place shielded by the raised platform. The cries from the office clearly suggested that the master squint was running out of time. He made sure that Wendell was no longer in the lab, pulled at the twine, then waited.

The explosion seemed to immediately put him back in his own home, fighting for his life.


	40. Knowing How

**Knowing How**

"What the hell, Brennan?"

Her cough postponed anything else she'd like to say. Trying to take a deep breath, trying to talk only aggravated the cough, so she tried to express her feelings through a disapproving look.

But she couldn't really argue with what Brennan did. The bad guys were hanging back, probably turned into abominable snowmen, their lungs coated with the same powder that clung to their clothes. She was fine with moving forward—once her lungs approved—but Brennan, of course, would have none of it.

Before either she or Sweets could protest, the woman was creeping back to the hallway they'd just left.

And, of course, they couldn't let her go alone, so they followed.

She half-expected the bad guys to jump up from behind the wall and yell, "Boo!" at them in their ghostly white, but peeking around the corner revealed a different sight.

"Oh, my God," she managed to croak out.

Both men lay on the floor like crumpled sheets, the confusion of the fire extinguisher contents enough to make them shoot wildly and—_thankfully_—hit each other.

"This is like something out of the movies," Sweets coughed out.

If it had been the movies, Brennan would have come up with a smart alecky reply, "It's all in **knowing how**," or some such thing before the next act took them all to some other dangerous situation.

But Brennan made no comment, only grabbed the gun from near one of the crumpled sheets and then peeled the gun from the hand of the other which she handed to her.

One of the piles moved and her friend offered up a final Brennanism, "You should have surrendered when you had the opportunity," before rejoining them and leading the way through the basement.

oOo

The explosion did its job—rocking the lab, sending smoke billowing out of the room and drawing three men out of Angela's office. With the fire alarm blaring, he raced to the office for Hodgins.

It was not a pretty operation, nor an especially brilliant one, simply a matter of drawing away some of the 5 targets and conserving his ammunition for the two men still inside with his friend. The math was not in their favor—1 gun, 2 clips each with 7 bullets, 5 targets and 1 hostage. He was sure the fire alarm might change the odds, but he wasn't counting on it.

He expected a firefight in Angela's office.

Instead he found Hodgins slumped over on a chair, the only thing holding him on it were electrical cords harvested from somewhere in the lab.

"Bug boy," he whispered as he tested the ties. "Time to go home."

Hodgins responded slowly, deliberately. "Booth?"

"I need a knife. Scissors."

"Angie's desk." Hodgins suggested. "Man, you look like hell."

Hodgins didn't look much better. He opened drawers and found a pair of scissors, a utility knife and a nearly full bottle of Scotch. He grabbed them all.

"It worked," Hodgins said as Booth sawed through the knotted mess holding the squint to the chair. "Caroline and Cam were taking this all the way to the Justice Department. Cleared your name." He seemed to remember something. "Wendell. We have to get Wendell."

"He's safe." He cut through the remaining bit of cord. "Can you stand?"

Hodgins made a valiant effort, but he tottered better than he stood and Booth propped him up. "Baby steps. Remember how you did it with Michael Vincent."

Hodgins nodded, practically pretzeled back to the floor before Booth caught him and straightened him out. "Steady. Baby steps. Remember?"

This time Hodgins walked haltingly, but he was walking and between them they managed to get to the door before the fire alarm finally stopped.

"It's all a matter of **knowing how** to put. . . ."

Hodgins didn't get to finish as a shot hit the glass which cracked into thousands of tiny spider webs before breaking apart and crashing to the floor.

Booth dragged Hodgins to the floor as the glass rained down on them. "Stay down," he hissed. He pulled at the Scotch bottle under his arm and drew out a lighter. "Can you do something with these? Something we can throw?"

Hodgins nodded as another hail of bullets rained above them.

Booth popped up over a horizontal file cabinet and shot once to cover himself, his quick glance giving him a clearer idea of just how precarious their position was. Hodgins was pulling himself along the floor to some kind of rolling cabinet and was rifling through the contents.

Shots zinged above them and Booth tried to calculate the trajectories of the bullets as he watched them hit brick and a monitor and a piece of art.

"Where're the other two?" he muttered.

"There's only three here," Hodgins supplied, sliding toward him. "Two went looking for Angela." He had several glass water bottles and repurposed baby food jars. He held up one of the water bottles. "Ange loses them here at work and we end up buying another one." He paused. "She got away, right? They would have dragged her back here if they caught up with her."

It was one of a million questions he couldn't answer, but he went for what he did know. "She's probably more worried about you."

That seemed to satisfy Hodgins as another hail of bullets exploded around them.

oOo

She recognized the sound of gunfire even muffled as it was in the janitor's closet. The sharp pop-pop-pop seemed to be coming from the main lab and a peeking around the door showed that it seemed to be directed into one of the offices.

Angela's office.

Closing the door, she faced Sweets and Angela. Air heavily laced with cordite and burnt rubber had wafted in from the lab.

She explained what she saw even if she did not understand it.

"Obviously Hodgins got loose and. . . ," Sweets trailed off, uncertain of what he had seen peeking over Brennan's shoulder.

"Can you describe the men you saw?"

"I never really got a good look at them." Angela practically vibrated with fear. "Hodgins had me out of the lab faster than. . . ."

Whatever she said became lost in another round of fire that seemed closer than the last round.

"We shoot at anyone who isn't Hodgins or Wendell?"

Sweets' question was a good one, but one she had no answer for.

oOo

The first Scotch bomb was launched using a prayer and a promise and not much else. It landed several yards in front of the position of one of their targets, spreading out in an ocean of fire.

It only burned the floor of the lab.

"We need to get them closer."

"Try flinging these things after being tortured by having your arm practically wrenched out its socket."

Booth answered the only way he could, grabbing at one of the baby food jars, lighting the wick of some old colorful rag covered in paint smears and standing before flinging it as far as he could, landing it on the platform and farther from a target than Hodgins' attempt.

The fire was deadly to a plastic chair and little else.

His effort drew another spray of bullets.

"You're the squint," he yelled above the din. "Squint out something better."

oOo

He had peered around the door probably longer than he should have, but the view had afforded him enough information to confuse things even more. He closed the door and made his way back to the stairs and the women. The cordite and burnt smells coming from the lab were denser than the smell of some of the bodies he'd been witness to over the years.

"Someone is throwing Molotov cocktails out of your office and into the main lab." Shaking his head, he tried to make sense of it. "I couldn't tell if any shots were being fired from your office."

"It's got to be Hodgins," Brennan said. "Maybe Wendell."

Angela concurred. "Jack's always doing something to blow up the lab. Wendell might just be helping him."

It made sense. Sort of. But sitting here when they might be able to help Hodgins and Wendell didn't make sense.

"Angela, you stay here." He took the second gun from her and handed it to Dr. Brennan. "Dr. Brennan and I've got this."

They took the last steps to the hidden door of the janitor's closet and between them they whispered out a plan. They had the element of surprise, a decent angle on the shooters, but it still was an ugly plan with so many variables that he wondered if they shouldn't put this scenario into the qualifying course at the FBI target range. But it didn't really matter; Dr. Brennan was on his heels as they stormed out of the door, and took up positions.


	41. Fork in the Road

**Fork in the Road**

_**Author's Lament:**__ Whose idea was this anyway? Oh, yeah, mine. _

oOo

_Focus_.

He'd been through this before, the moment when the gun is more than just an extension of your hand, but it is your hand, meting out punishment, daring others to cross the line of fire.

_Focus_.

He had little more than a clip left, a half dozen of these fire bombs and little else.

_Focus_.

Hodgins deserved better, deserved to see his son grow up. Angela—quirky Angela—she should have someone to grow old with. And him?

He wanted to see Bones, to see her wrinkle up and slow down and to celebrate each year as if it were going to be their last. He wanted to see Parker grow into being a man and to guide him along the way. He wanted to see Christine become the best of both of them—Bones' brains and beauty and his sense and heart. He wanted to see Pops and talk some sense into Jared and see something more of this world beyond these walls.

_Focus_.

"Do we have anything else we can throw at them?"

Hodgins was favoring his left arm, but it hadn't slowed him. "Ange's got some turpentine, I think, and some modeling clay, no, mineral spirits. Maybe." He scurried back toward the work area, sweeping away the shards of glass with a book that had seen better days.

_Focus_.

_Nine bullets, flammables. . . ._ _Focus, dammit_. _Nine bullets, flammables, and . . . . _

Something had shifted outside the office—gunfire. The hail of bullets was aimed elsewhere and he took a chance to peer over the file cabinet.

"Who are they shooting at? SWAT?"

He listened. Small arms fire coming from across the lab. He looked again.

It was all he needed. He aimed and fired, the gun an extension of his mind. One gunman down.

"Hodgins?" he called out. "Can you do something with that clay?"

oOo

No simulations, no practice on the target range could be really prepare one for this. He'd caught a bullet, a graze really, but he'd set up in a good spot, one that gave him cover and an eye line on Dr. Brennan. She'd taken the lead, sprinted across the lab while he did his best to keep the other gunmen honest, but she'd gone down hard—he couldn't tell it she had been hit—losing one of the guns in the process. Somehow she had found her feet again and limped to a spot behind a pylon.

And the gunmen? Wendell or Hodgins had brought one of them down.

Everything was moving so fast. Dr. Brennan had wasted no time spraying bullets at one of the gunmen who had been using the corner of the platform for cover forcing him to try for a safe spot only to have Wendell or Hodgins shoot him, once, twice, before he went down.

Leaving one.

Between him and Dr. Brennan and Wendell—_or was it Hodgins_— the last man had been forced to hide behind some over turned examination tables on the platform and looked to be ready for a long siege.

oOo

The lab seemed to explode once again in gunfire, but for once it didn't seem directed their way. Common sense won out over curiosity and he bent to the task at hand: trying to make an explosive device out of next-to-nothing.

Scotch bombs pretty much bombed; they managed to keep the faux Feds from charging them, but that was about it. They only managed to flambé the floor.

Clay and mineral spirits? He poured the last of their flammable liquid into the baby food jar and rammed the pointed end of the scissors into the lid before stuffing a rag into the opening where the very end soaked up the liquid.

Not quite brilliant, but serviceable.

Booth was a machine of a different kind. Just being there had given him hope, made him believe they were getting out of there, a little bloodied, but alive. He still looked like hell, the beard uneven and his skin grayed from the smoke, flecks of blood on his face and arms where the glass had cut him. Machine he might be, but the man looked incredibly tired.

He probably looked just as bad.

"This is the last one," he said, handing over the home-made incendiary device. Gunfire erupted sporadically, always at a distance, and he asked the question again. "Who's out there?"

Booth brushed at a shard of glass on his pant leg. "Sweets. I think I saw Sweets. He must have brought back-up."

"Brennan. It's Brennan. They were supposed to see this lawyer who's had a hand in the blackmail scheme. Agent First was trying to get the information we got off that nipple ring."

"It's got to be Brennan."

The change was immediate. He shouldn't have been surprised; only one name could transform Booth like that.

oOo

She flattened herself against the small indentation in the brick, the bullets hitting the wall and sending up slivers of brick, forcing her to shield her eyes.

The rescue of Hodgins and Wendell wasn't going very well.

Her gun was empty, her foot throbbed, dorsiflexion and plantarflexion were definitely compromised. Any weight on her foot brought on blinding pain.

She looked longingly at the gun she'd dropped—only 3 meters away, but under the circumstances, it might as well have been 3 light years away.

oOo

"Agent First? Patrick? You should give up now, Patrick." His voice, colored by smoke and months of jail time, came out ragged and uneven. "The squints took the evidence against you to the Justice Department. It's over."

The words were one thing, the reality another. There hadn't been any return fire from Sweets or Bones for some time, but First was menacing them with sporadic gunfire still.

"Throw out your weapon, Patrick."

The reply was expected. Patrick First turned the gunfire on Angela's office and Booth hunkered down behind the cabinet, Hodgins safely behind a brick wall.

The only thing to do was to end this, but he waited, then spent two bullets into the middle of the examination table on the platform.

He had two more, a baby jar full of a different kind of firepower and the will to end this to save his people. To save his wife.

Several shots were fired toward Bones and Sweets. Then silence.

"Patrick?" He'd almost lost the Cleo Eller case to Patrick First all those years ago. Probably would have lost Bones as well. He wasn't willing to lose another minute to Patrick First.

He lit the rag on the baby food jar, stood up and left the relative safety of the file cabinet before striding toward the platform and firing one shot, making a perfect toss of the Molotov cocktail into the middle of the examination table fort.

oOo

He was crouching behind a pillar when he heard that voice.

Booth.

It took more than a second for it to sink in. Booth.

Booth.

Despite everything, the thick air and the shots keeping him pinned down, he suddenly had a sense that this was a change in fortunes, **a fork in the road**, as it were.

Booth. They had Booth back.

He was sure they were going to win this thing.

oOo

She forgot the pain when she heard his voice.

It was _him_.

_Or maybe the pain was causing her to hear things she wanted to hear. . . . No! While it was rational to want to hear his voice. . . . Oh, hell. _

It _was_ him.

oOo

The flames brought a cry of pain and Patrick First, architect of his own pain these past months, had stood up, gun forgotten and all he had to do was pull the trigger.

And the bullet was an extension of his mind.


End file.
